It would not be an exaggeration to call Sandra Manzke the queen of Wall Street's hedge-fund industry.
From her vantage point in the mid-1970s as a partner in a traditional financial firm catering to Fortune 100 companies, Ms Manzke watched as hedge funds grew in popularity as a financial instrument that could perform well in good markets and bad.
At the time, hedge funds were the domain of the super wealthy, with entry requiring investible cash of between US$1 million and US$5 million. Investment legends such as George Soros were known to run money thorough hedge funds managed by big-name traders.
By the late 1970s the hedge-fund industry was beginning to attract the attention of many of Wall Street's brightest stars. Gifted traders who ran the trading operations of some of New York's biggest investment banks were beginning to desert the traditional industry in search of the bigger financial returns and professional challenge.
Many of these traders had made untold millions in the investment game already, Ms Manzke says, but they were attracted by the lure of running an operation that could play both sides of the market.
For example, the traditional fund industry felt hamstrung by the one-dimensional equities-long strategy, which forced them to bet on a group of stocks that would, hopefully, go up in price.
Hedge funds, on the other hand, appealed to the egos of star players, who could fire up 'absolute returns' strategies which allowed long or short equity bets, hedging, and the ability to shift cash around different asset classes. For many Wall Street stars it became more lucrative to trade their own accounts through self-managed hedge funds than wait for the comparatively meagre end-of-year bonus at an investment bank.