hedge fund

hedge fund (plural hedge funds)

1. (finance) Any unregistered investment fund, often characterised by unconventional strategies (i.e., strategies other than investing long only in bonds, equities or money markets).
   • 2011 July 18, John Cassidy, “Mastering the Machine”, in The New Yorker‎, →ISSN:

     Hedge funds date to 1949, when Alfred Winslow Jones, a writer at Fortune, opened a private investment firm using sixty thousand dollars he had raised from friends and forty thousand he had saved. To boost his returns, Jones borrowed heavily and bought stocks he liked “on margin”—a practice that had been discredited in the late nineteen-twenties.

All hedge funds are supposed to be hedged from risk; hence the name.