Hedge funds used to be the man. According to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from hedge fund industry research company HFR Inc., hedge funds employing various equity strategies beat the total returns on the S&P 500 Index by an annual average of more than five percentage points between 1990 and 2009. Since then, such funds on average have trailed the index by almost 9 percentage points annually. Not surprisingly, wealthy investors and institutional investors who generally pay full freight (i.e., the traditional “2 and 20” fee structure) are jumping ship.