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Jones’ is normally referred to as the first hedge fund because he used/invented shorting.

Before him, if you wanted to make a negative bet on a stock you could really only do it with spread betting.

That’s not true. Shorting equities goes back to the East Indies Company and is often blamed for crises going back at least to the late 1700s.

Jacob Little was a giant Wall Street shorter in the 1830s.

The answer is that aw jones was the first to use the long short hedging strategy. That is why his fund is called a hedge fund and is considered the first of its kind. Others have used shorting before but he was the first to use the strategy of specifically entering a short position to protect a different long position. Well, he was the first one to officially theorize it and market it, at least. That is why when carol loomis described his fund, she coined the word hedge fund.

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