Oreos, oatmeal, toilet paper, tinfoil, light bulbs, hammers, coffee, sliced meat - is there anything these New York delis don’t have? And where on earth do they get the cash to buy all this stuff? It’s not like those hammers are flying off the shelves.

Thank god for hedge funds.

That’s right, friend. The line of credit many deli owners use to stock their shelves likely comes, indirectly, from a hedge fund.

Small lenders offer businesses with poor or little credit short-term loans to buy inventory, make payroll and keep the lights on. These lenders often get their money from hedge funds, since banks typically shy away from such high-risk lending (subprime loans notwithstanding). The money doesn’t come cheap, so hedge funds earn a healthy return helping you satisfy those impulse purchases.

Hedge funds have been around for almost 60 years. The first was opened in 1949, by Australian-born Alfred Jones.

At the time, most money managers bought stock and waited for shares to go up. Jones, on the other hand, supplemented his “buy-and-hold” positions by betting that certain stocks would go down - a form of protection known as a “hedge.” He smoked the competition - and the modern hedge fund was born.

Hedge funds get paid to manage risk. In order to manage it, they must assume it. They focus on investing in a broad range of asset classes, from the increasingly wild world of stocks to credit markets, commodities, currencies and derivatives.

Despite the spectrum of strategies today’s hedge funds employ, most are paid in about the same way: 1% or 2% of the total amount of money they manage for their clients, and 20% of every dollar they earn on their behalf.

But not just anyone can invest with these wizards of Wall Street. Most funds have strict requirements regarding investors, usually of the net-worth variety, used to separate so-called sophisticates from us average Joes.

Now, ask any hedge fund manager worth his salt about his guiding principles, and he’ll tell you he wakes up every day seeking Alpha. Alpha refers to measuring returns not just in absolute terms, but on a risk-adjusted basis.

Earning 20% a year isn’t a good thing if you have to assume huge amounts of risk to do it. Most funds would rather earn 10%, if they can avoid being subject to the whims of the broader market. This focus on risk, rather than return, allows hedge funds to make money whether the market goes up or down.