[matt holland]

Thanks for the effort you put into the post, I don't have anywhere near the knowledge to understand all this, but it was very interesting.

If the shorting hedge funds idea works like I imagine it, it appears to be a great argument. Could a similar thing be done with mutual funds?

Something I was thinking about beta, if the market actually did reward this extra "risk," wouldn't an index fund of the stocks with the highest betas be expected to drastically outperform the S&P in the long run?

"Vanguard’s moderately expensive indexing fees [when compared to BGI or SSgA]" Could you expand upon this?

Lastly, if the avg. investor in this forum was interested in alpha from hedge funds, how would they go about it? what would they look for? I imagine these questions are too detailed to answer here, but if you could recommend a resource or starting point to answer these questions it would be really appreciated.

Naj, thanks again for your time. Responses from anyone would be greatly appreciated.