Alfred Winslow Jones (9 September 1900 – 2 June 1989) was an American investor, hedge fund manager, and sociologist.
[2] 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.
[4] 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.
[6] Sebastian Mallaby dedicated a chapter in his 2010 book entitled More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite, in which he describes Jones as "an erudite dandy, a onetime Marxist who hiked to the frontlines of the Spanish Civil War with the writer Dorothy Parker—where they shared a bottle of Scotch whisky with Ernest Hemingway.
[7] During the 1940s Jones worked for Fortune magazine and wrote articles on non-financial subjects such as Atlantic convoys, farm cooperatives, and boys' prep schools.
He studied a dozen or so of these "technicians", whose approaches ranged from volume/price ratios to odd-lot statistics to the outcome of the Harvard–Yale football game.
He was beginning to feel his way down a dimly lit path toward what today would be considered a factor-based approach to portfolio construction.
In one passage on Molodovsky he said, "Well controlled experimental work of this nature is important and likely to become more accurate as the methods are further developed."
[14] Jones referred to his fund as being "hedged", a term then commonly used on Wall Street to describe the management of investment risk due to changes in the financial markets.
He gradually disengaged himself from his office and gave his time to the Peace Corps and even tried to establish a "reverse Peace Corps" in which aid recipients would send their own volunteers back to the United States to work with the poor in that country, as a "hedge" against creating a culture of inferiority among developing countries.
[5][23] In 2008, he was inducted into Institutional Investors Alpha's Hedge Fund Manager Hall of Fame along with Bruce Kovner, David Swensen, and others.