[jyl]

If you don't have $250K or more, you won't be able to invest in a hedge fund anyway. And $250K won't get you into the big/best ones, not close. There are "fund of funds" that you could look into, but they have minimums too.

The hedge fund world is complex. There are funds that:
- Are long/short equity and market neutral
- Are long-short equity and make market bets
- Use leverage or not (most do)
- Are macro funds, betting on overall country indicies, currencies, etc
- Are fixed income or convertible debt focused
- Are event-driven, usually M&A
- Use quantitative systems to varying degrees
- Focus on specific markets, sectors, commodities, ETFs, etc
- Are activist funds
- On and on

It is difficult to get true performance data for hedge funds, because they report performance only voluntarily, so the data has a major survivorship bias. When a fund's performance goes bad, they stop reporting, and if it stays bad, they shut the fund down and start another one. Actual performance is lower than reported, for the industry as a whole, and performance varies hugely between funds, types of funds, and time frame.