yeah, we need a different name for these things, like FAM, "flexible asset managers", or AIMs, alternative asset managers. The key point is that they can do whatever they want, not that they "hedge" anything.
Unregulated mutual fund?
Hardly. There's tons of regulations around them.
The business of a lot of them amounts to sticking 80% of the money in whatever's trendy, 20% in the managers pockets, roughly. Not a bad deal for the managers if you can pull it off.
Paraphrasing the lede here[1]:
Hedge funds produce little to no alpha and investors have known that for quite a while.