Name: Leon Cooperman: The Hedge Fund Industry Needs to Change
Uploaded: 2016-05-13
Duration: 1 min 29 s
Description: SALT Hedge Fund Conference Jet

Hi. I'm Steve Gandel from Fortune Magazine, and I'm here at the SALT Hedge Fund Conference in Las Vegas which typically draws economists and hedge fund managers and politicians to come and talk about the state of the economy and how things are doing. But one of the big topics of conversation this year Has been hedge funds themselves, and the fact that they're not doing very well. The performance has been down. And a number of large investors like AIG and MetLife is said they're pulling their money out of hedge funds. And just last week, Warren Buffett bashed hedge funds saying they don't add much performance That's led to some soul- searching among hedge fund managers including Leon Cooperman, who said at the conference that things need to change in the hedge fund industry and maybe we need to lower fees. Perhaps that's appropriate then than on the conference room floor of the SALT Hedge Fund Conference, one of the presenters Is NetJets. NetJets allows you to buy a jet, like the one I'm sitting in, for much less. Normally a jet like this costs $ 30 million. But with NetJets, you can get a share of it for $ 3 million, 50 hours a year of flying. And it'll cost you about $ 350, 000 a year in maintenance fees to be able to fly around in one of these. And the nice thing is it has its own bathroom. And it's got a changing room with a place to put your luggage. Now the ironic thing here is that the man that owns that jet, the company that owns that jet, is Berkshire Hathaway. It's owned by Warren Buffet. So, hedge fund managers, if your performance doesn't turn around, Warren Buffet's got a jet to sell you.

Leon Cooperman: The Hedge Fund Industry Needs to Change

He said during the SALT Conference that it might be time to lower fees.