I can't figure out why anyone invests in active management, so asking me about hedge funds is just an extreme version of the same question. Since I think everything is appropriately priced, my advice would be to avoid high fees. So you can forget about hedge funds.

The distribution of the market is fat-tailed relative to the normal distribution... For passive investors, none of this matters, beyond being aware that outlier returns are more common than would be expected if return distributions were normal.

I take the market-efficiency hypothesis to be the simple statement that security prices fully reflect all available information.

In an efficient market at any point in time the actual price of a security will be a good estimate of its intrinsic value.

I don't think the Federal Reserve has any role in how high rates are right now. I don't understand why everyone is paying attention to this tapering. The Fed is using one kind of bond to buy another kind of bond. What's the big deal, and why is anyone taking the Fed seriously?

Markets are efficient, but there are different dimensions of risk and those lead to different dimensions of expected returns. That's what people should be concerned with in their investment decisions and not with whether they can pick stocks, pick winners and losers among the various managers delivering basically the same product.

People would be a lot more skeptical if they understood that there is an incredible amount of chance in the results that you observe for active managers. So the distribution of outcomes is enormously wide - but that's exactly what you'd expect by chance with lots of active managers who hold imperfectly diversified portfolios. The really good portfolios contain a lot of really lucky picks, and the really bad portfolios contain a lot of really unlucky picks as well as some really bad ones.