Australian investor, hedge fund manager, and sociologist, credited with forming the first modern hedge fund and widely regarded as the “father of the hedge fund industry.”
Jones was the son of Arthur Winslow Jones (an executive of General Electric) and his wife, Elizabeth Huntington. He moved to the United States with his family when he was 4. He graduated from Harvard University in 1923, and, after working as purser on a tramp steamer that sailed around the world, he joined the Foreign Service. In the early 1930s, he became vice consul at the U.S. embassy in Berlin during Hitler’s rise to power. In 1932, for a couple of months he was married to Anna Luise Hauser, née Block (1896–1982), a daughter of the German painter Joseph Block and a descendant of German banker Joseph Mendelssohn. In 1936, he married Mary Carter, with whom he travelled through Spain during that country’s civil war, reporting on civilian relief for the Quakers. In 1941, he earned a doctorate in sociology at Columbia University.
Jones is credited with coining the phrase “hedged fund” and is credited with creating the first hedge fund structure in 1949. That year, he established an investment partnership, A.W. Jones & Co., that would exploit this new style of investing. He raised a total of $100,000, $40,000 of which was his own. In its first year the partnership’s gain on its capital came to a very respectable 17.3 percent.
In 1984, Jones transformed his fund into a fund of funds, investing its capital in other hedge funds with different areas of expertise and investment styles.
Jones died on 2 June 1989, aged 88, in Redding, Connecticut. In 2008, he was inducted into Institutional Investors Alpha’s Hedge Fund Manager Hall of Fame.
Link to Wikipedia biography