It can be hard to separate the wheat from the chaff because there is no immediately obvious difference between them. These days, the world of hedge funds more closely resembles a vast pile of chaff, with just a few grains of wheat here and there.

Given that there are some ten thousand hedge funds in existence around the world today, and only one in ten is a hedge fund in the true sense of the meaning (see diagram), it takes a highly skilled and firm hand to sort through them all.