I’m think a 50.4% fee for the entire industry gains sounds fine. Ackman and his hedge friend friends serve an important societal role: They’ve collectively done more to reduce America’s wealth disparity than any individual, political movement, or industry I know of. I salute them.

While the clients are usually relatively rich, the managers who siphon off all this money are even richer, so it's not really helping.

The typical fees are 2% management and 20% performance fees; Pershing is high, but not quite that high, with 1.5% and 16%. More importantly, the client who has had the very high returns that Pershing has obtained is unlikely to complain about going from 20% to 15%, but if the pre-fee return is much lower than 20%, as is typical for the hedge funds analysed, that fixed 2% management fee really kills. The 50.4% overall fee is what was observed for the whole industry; the number for the top-20 hedge funds was 34.3% (for the smaller hedge funds, it was 55.7%.) For Pershing, with 256% returns over the last 10 years even after fees, compared to 113% for the S&P (both without dividends), it's a bit easier to live with the high fees than for the average HF which underperforms the S&P after fees.