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PEOPLE - James Perkins

Youth must be served, and when it comes to money management, James Perkins, the wiry 29-year-old portfolio manager of a small, two-year-old, New York–based hedge fund called Thrasher Fund, wants to be the one to do it.

Perkins, a onetime investor relations analyst at AllianceBernstein, has launched a new mutual fund aimed at Gen­eration X, the 51 million people born from the mid-’60s to the late ’70s, whose investment needs he believes traditional money managers have overlooked. The GendeX Fund started trading on October 15 with a $100,000 all-cap portfolio of 80 to 120 stocks that is designed to grow 10 percent to 15 percent annually. The fund fell 3.0 percent through November 28 — but still beat the Standard & Poor’s 500 index — while Perkins threw several loud, alcohol-fueled parties to solicit initial deposits of as little as $100 from crowds of 20- and 30-somethings. Says Perkins, “We want to be as much a part of their lives as Fidelity Investments thinks it should be a part of their parents’ lives.”