When to show up to a hedge fund conference—and when not to

The Connecticut Hedge Fund Association got a lot of queries this week about whether its annual conference in Greenwich would go on as planned. It did, and Reuters tells us what it was like:

The $1.9 trillion hedge fund industry's own losses were on the minds of the roughly 350 managers and job seekers settled into a local hotel's conference room. The average fund is down about 5 percent this year, according to data from Hedge Fund Research.

In whispers, some managers traded rumours about who was suffering the most, losing employees and begging new investors to come in. Others boasted about industry success stories like manager John Paulson who earned billions on being among the first to bet the housing market would collapse.

Some fund managers declared all was fine and that they were doing exactly what clients wanted—delivering returns that are not correlated with stock or bond markets.

"This is a golden age for us because when equities are down we are up," said Kenneth Griebell, adding that his Frontier Funds put money into energy, metals, and currencies and are now up between 6 percent and 18 percent this year.

But Jean de Bolle, chief investment officer at Byron Advisors Ltd, cautioned the full picture was not represented here. "A lot of the people who are seeing massive red ink and are suffering the most are not here," he said.

Barbara!