The first hedge fund looked nothing like most started today. The founder had little investing experience and had bounced around several careers – diplomacy, sociology and journalism – before settling on investing at age 48. Alfred Winslow Jones is widely thought to have created the first "hedged fund" in the late 1940s (though some credit legendary value investor Ben Graham). He got the idea while researching a markets article for Fortune magazine. Jones' concept was simple: create a "hedge" by shorting stocks he thought would drop in value while going long, and sometimes using leverage, on stocks that he thought ... (full story)