It may be hard to remember this after a decade of badly trailing the broader markets, but the ostensible purpose of a hedge fund—and the willingness of investors to pay their fees—is to produce alpha, which is to say outperformance of said market. Its absence explains the proliferation of premature obituaries, which did not account for investors’ apparently insatiable desire to pay far too much for far, far too little, and for the existential question, “What, exactly, is the point of these things?”