Two weeks from now, a seven-year-old hedge fund called Alson Capital Partners will return around $800 million to its investors, and shut its doors for good.

The fund was founded and managed by Neil Barsky, 51, a former Wall Street Journal reporter-turned-Morgan Stanley analyst, who started his first hedge fund in 1998, just as the “hedge fund decade” was gaining steam. He was an old-fashioned stock picker who ran Alson Capital as a classic “long-short” stock fund, meaning that he bought companies he thought had good long-term prospects, while shorting companies he thought were likely to fall off the cliff. At its peak, Alson Capital had $3.5 billion under management, charged a 1.5 percent management fee, took 20 percent of the profits, and, when you include Mr. Barsky’s predecessor fund, produced compounded annualized returns of 12.11 percent a year. It’s fair to say he’s made a pretty penny.

Mr. Barsky is also a source of mine. In the decade or so that I’ve known him, I was able to quote him by name only once. As he explained to me recently, hedge fund managers who become too visible can make their investors wonder, “Why are you spending all your time on TV when you should be managing my money?” But he was one of the people I turned to when I wanted to learn what was really going on in the market. He is blunt, sardonic, funny and passionate, an insider who never lost his outsider’s perspective.

So when I read that he was quitting, I went to see him. I was hoping he would be willing to reflect on his life and times as a hedge fund manager, on the record this time. Happily, he was.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/16/business/16nocera.html?8dpc=&pagewanted=print