Hedge Fund Manager's Farewell.

Two weeks from now, a seven-year-old hedge fund called Alson Capital Partners will return around $800 million to its investors, and shut its doors for good. The fund was founded and managed by Neil Barsky, 51, a former Wall Street Journal reporter-turned-Morgan Stanley analyst, who started his first hedge fund in 1998, just as the ''hedge fund decade'' was gaining steam. He was an old-fashioned stock picker who ran Alson Capital as a classic ''long-short'' stock fund, meaning that he bought companies he thought had good long-term prospects, while shorting companies he thought were likely to fall off the cliff. At its peak, Alson Capital had $3.5 billion under management, charged a 1.5 percent management fee, took 20 percent of the profits, and, when you include Mr. Barsky's predecessor fund, produced compounded annualized returns of 12.11 percent a year. It's fair to say he's made a pretty penny. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]