The end of self-help?

It used to be that if you wanted a job done properly, you did it yourself. That no longer holds for the administration of hedge funds. The practice of doing middle and back office administrative work in-house, especially prevalent in long-established US funds, was already on the wane. But Bernie Madoff’s alleged fraud, abetted by his self-contained operation, has accelerated the march towards outsourcing. Exhibit A this week is Millennium Management, the old-school hedge fund firm run by Izzy En...