Why are hedge funds called hedge funds?
After the first one, set up by Alfred Winslow Jones in 1949, which bought stocks it liked and sold short stocks it didn't, so it was "hedged" against the market as a whole falling.
Jones's fund also borrowed to invest and charged a share of profits rather than a flat fee, the model hedge funds still follow. The name stuck even as funds moved into strategies that hedge little or not at all, and today it means a private, lightly regulated fund more than a hedged one.