Ever wonder how hedge fund managers get to become hedge fund managers? It'd be pretty interesting to have $1 billion at your fingertips to try and make some loot.

Portfolio.com has an interesting article today entitled, "Digging Up Dirt on Fund Managers", which explores the people behind the computers in the hedge fund industry. Based upon a recent survey published by the Greenwich Roundtable and Quinnipiac University, researchers claim that almost 82% of investors in hedge funds have decided not to invest with a manager because of allegations of unethical behavior. (See my recent post about a leading hedge fund manager facing time.)

In an industry that is supposedly driven by hard, cold numbers and return on investment, it's interesting to see how when you get down to it, managing money is still built on trust. The same article quotes Steve McMenamin, executive director of the Greenwich Roundtable, a non-profit research group for investors in alternative assets, as saying, "These fund structures are based on trust. If there's even a hint of impropriety, investors tend to shy away."

Interesting findings indeed.

Zack Miller is the Managing Editor of IsraelNewsletter.com and a former equity analyst for a leading multinational hedge fund.

With airline traffic steadily increasing, more and more of us are faced with the same question; How in the world am I going to fit all these things in our luggage? Maybe it is time to start thinking outside of the box, and instead of packing all our things, maybe we should just start to consider sending our belongs ahead of time and stop worrying about packing all of our things?

As I read Joe Brancatelli's (portfolio.com) article discussing airline baggage, I could not help think back to December when my girlfriend had her bags lost for over a week on a trip from Europe back to the states for Christmas. Inside this luggage we had all her clothes, as well as all of my family's Christmas presents. Since she was flying into the states on Christmas Eve, and the airline lost her bags for a week, we had no presents to give out on Christmas, and by the time they showed up, on New Years Eve, the Christmas magic was pretty much lost.

As we examined last week, airline delays last year were near an all time high, but as I mentioned in my article, the one thing that bothers me more than being late, is arriving without my luggage. While lost baggage rates stayed pretty steady last year, with 9 out of 1,000 passengers filing lost baggage claims, there are other reasons why we may should consider shipping instead of packing in the future.

Portfolio.com featured its picks for the ten dumbest moves by CEOs in 2007. The list shows a nice range and depth of stupidity on the part of CEOs -- and it hasn't gone unnoticed that there are no women on this list of dummies. Here are their picks and my two cents:

• John Mackey, Whole Foods Market (NASDAQ: WFMI) -- He displayed his brilliance by posting on message boards under the screen name Rahodeb, hyping Whole Foods while not letting people know exactly who it was that was hyping the company. (Seems reminiscent of Patrick Byrne of Overstock.com (NASDAQ: OSTK).) The company ended up banning executives from participating on any message boards.
• Paul Wolfowitz, World Bank -- Getting his girlfriend at the bank a transfer and a raise. Need we say more?
• Steve Jobs, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) -- Ticking off early adopters by slashing $200 off the original price of the $600 iPhone shortly after its debut. Nothing like causing your loyal customers to think twice before they run right out to be the first to buy Apple's next new gadget.
• Chris Albrecht, HBO -- An alleged assault of his girlfriend in Las Vegas ended in his arrest. And then came the news that he did something similar in the early 1990s. Not the kind of headlines you want from your CEO.