With a growing focus placed on so-called "hedge fund" strategies, a few investors have started to wonder whether their outperformance might not be fully attributable to the implicit or explicit leverage that characterizes them. Thus, would it make sense for investors simply to seek the excess returns hedge funds provide by replicating the leverage inside their own portfolios, rather than investing in the strategies themselves? Though the hypothesis that one might replace hedge fund strategies with internal portfolio leverage might be sensible, it would be harder to execute if one could not demonstrate that leveraging selected factor exposures is an important explanation for the value added they generate. What if one concluded that any such leverage is applied to specific, and thus not systematic, manager insights?in other words, that it would be much less straightforward if portfolio leverage related to "alpha" rather than "beta"? If that were the case, one would be left with one of two plausible alternatives. One could first attempt to find a way to leverage the "alpha" of a traditional (implicitly, active and long only) manager all the while neutralizing the associated additional market risk. Alternatively, assuming that one really needs exposure to those excess returns, one would need to develop a strategy to invest in the so-called hedge fund sector, finding a way to satisfy oneself that this alpha can be earned regularly and in as fee-efficient a manner as possible.