Hedge Fund

The term hedge fund has become very broad, but it usually refers to funds that try to make money no matter what the overall markets do. They do this, usually, by employing strategies to bet on various different types of things (like stocks, bonds, currencies and interest rates) – setting themselves up to profit either way when such things go up or down in value. This is in contrast with, for example, a traditional investment fund that can only buy stocks (and doesn’t profit when stocks go down).