Alfred Winslow Jones (9 September 1900 – 2 June 1989) was an Australian investor, hedge fund manager, and sociologist. He is credited with forming the first modern hedge fund and is widely regarded as the "father of the hedge fund industry." Early life and education Jones was born in Melbourne, Australia, the son of Arthur Winslow Jones (an executive of General Electric) and his wife, Elizabeth Huntington. He moved to the United States with his family when he was 4, growing up in Schenectady, New York. He graduated from Harvard University in 1923, and, after working as purser on a tramp steamer that sailed around the world, he joined the Foreign Service. In the early 1930s, he became vice consul at the U.S. embassy in Berlin during Hitler's rise to power. In 1932, for a couple of months he was married to Anna Luise Hauser, née Block (1896–1982), a daughter of the German painter Joseph Block and a descendant of German banker Joseph Mendelssohn. In 1936, he married Mary Carter, with whom he travelled through Spain during that country's civil war, reporting on civilian relief for the Quakers. In 1941, he earned a doctorate in sociology at Columbia University. He then completed his doctoral thesis, Life, Liberty and Property, a survey of attitudes toward property in Akron, Ohio. Sebastian Mallaby dedicated a chapter in his 2010 book entitled More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite, in which he describes Jones as "an erudite dandy, a onetime Marxist who hiked to the frontlines of the Spanish Civil War with the writer Dorothy Parker—where they shared a bottle of Scotch whisky with Ernest Hemingway. Academic career During the 1940s Jones worked for Fortune magazine and wrote articles on non-financial subjects such as Atlantic convoys, farm cooperatives, and boys' prep schools. In March 1949, Jones was investigating technical methods of market analysis for an article titled "Fashions in Forecasting", reporting on a new class of stock-market timers and the approaches they employed to call the market. He studied a dozen or so of these "technicians", whose approaches ranged from volume/price ratios to odd-lot statistics to the outcome of the Harvard–Yale football game. In "Fashions," Jones assessed each approach, sometimes harshly and other times positively. For example, Jones commented on one analysis that "…the market trend succeeded itself 62.5 times out of a hundred and reversed itself 37.5