Academic

The Times's always enjoyable Sunday long-form piece is on the implosion of hedge funds, and it's pretty much what you'd expect, it all went south, regulation is coming, Citadel as a crisis case study, and so on.  This sentence, however, stood out to me, and reminded me of a passel of questions I have about hedge funds:

Two out of three hedge funds lost money last year

Really?  I've only heard of one hedge fund that is making money these days, Paulson & Co., which famously bet against subprime, and, perhaps even more importantly, timed the bet right (the Times story brings up one other profitable fund).  So here are my questions, and they probably reflect the fact that this isn't exactly an area of expertise:

• Who are these profitable hedge funds?  I mean, two out of three mutual funds do worse than the market every year, with fees, but there's still plenty of news about the profitable ones.  These days, all we hear about hedge funds is doom and gloom - if one third of them are making money, shouldn't they be, you know, getting the word out?
• How come most of them are losing money?  This is a roundabout way of asking about the zero sum nature of credit default swaps, which always looked to me a bit like a proprietary market of the hedge funds, and also a question related to the history of the funds - they allegedly made money when the dot com bubble collapsed.  If Citadel lost a pile of money on CDS (and it, formerly among the best-reputed of the funds, is down 55%, more than the 18% average), someone made money on the other sides of those trades, I assume.  Who?
• Did John Paulson just get lucky once, when he bet against housing?  He made money this year, which might be residue from his probably risky but very successful bearish housing bet, or it might mean that he saw both the housing collapse and the credit crisis coming ... which would be impressive foresight indeed.

Anyway, you get the idea.  I'd be interested to read answers to these questions, but I haven't seen said answers yet.