Katherine Burton (3)Rezensionen

Hedge funds, always an interesting topic for financial nerds, this book fits right in the mix. A series of profiles on hedge funds and their creators. Though each one is somewhat unique in their approach they all seek the common goal of cashing in big; or at least better than the averages.

For the most part these investment titans and gurus succeed, where many else tend to fail. The material is dated before the major market meltdown of '08 but still there are many interesting success stories here to delve into and in searching for these same names today a fair number are still at it. Not particularly entertaining reading for most but for those looking to admire financial superstardom there is quite a lot to bite into.

When I picked up Hedge Hunters by Katherine Burton, I had no idea what a hedge fund was. Now that I’m finished with it, I’m still not sure what they are all about. But that’s okay, because the book’s goal isn’t to explain hedge funds. Its purpose is to give the reader a glimpse at the diverse personalities and backgrounds of the most influential and successful of these maverick investors.

Burton does so expertly, sharing biographies and investment strategies of both long-term masters of the field and the up-and-coming talent that threaten to take over the field in the years to come.

The business strategies and attitudes of these hedge barons are as diverse and eclectic as the market itself, as are their motivations and origins, and each bio offers an interesting perspective that will keep you reading until the very end.

So you may not understand hedge funds any more than you did before you read Hedge Hunters, but you will definitely have a better understanding of the traders who have mastered them.

This book seems surprisingly anachronistic given that it was written in 2007. I had hoped the book might shed some light on the shadowy unregulated hedge fund markets. Instead what I got was a glimpse of the all too cozy relationship between hedge fund managers and the reporters who cover them. At times it seemed like Katherine Burton of Bloomburg News was tripping over herself trying to portray hedge fund managers as heroes of capitalism, and really great guys once you got to know them. If you were looking for hard journalism, you will be disappointed. This is a fluff job the managers might have written themselves.

Hedge Hunters is a collection of interviews of hedge fund managers and their protégés. The author of Hedge Hunters Katherine Burton, sat down with these financial renegades and tried to ascertain what made them tick.

Surprisingly, what she found is that there is no one way to manage a hedge fund. All of the people she interviewed had different backgrounds. Some came from commodities, some from prestigious schools, some were engineers, and some were lawyers. The only thing that really made any of them similar is their drive to succeed, their winning track records, and their desire to seek a profit for their investors.

Each of the Hedge Hunters profiled in this book have different styles of investing, different niche areas, and different goals. What Burton has done in this book is reassure the financial student that no matter their background, if they work at it, seek new skills, and find a good mentor, they too can have successful, billion dollar hedge funds.

This book is a good resource for someone who only knows a little about hedge funds, or who wants to learn more about the personalities behind the success. Those people who enjoy reading Donald Trump’s success books are a likely audience as well. This book also tries to give strategies for succes based in personality, rather than method. Each chapter has the brevity of an article, (Burton is reporter for Bloomberg) and so makes for good plane or lunch hour reading.

Although at times Burton can be a bit repetitious in her phrasing, it will help the initiate to the world of hedge funds better understand the investing process. The reader may also tire of the sheer number of interviews; there are 18 chapters in all, and a lot of overlap in styles and methods. The reader would do well to focus on reading the chapter most relevant to what they would like to do, and then expanding outward into some of the other interviews. And this is not a how-to book of hedge fund investing, but rather a look into the minds of the people who make them successful. Mom and pop investor will not glean much from this, as the "masters" are mostly using institutional investors money and so have little to say to the small investor.

Burton did an excellent job in finding a cross section of managers representing all different styles and methods. There are really careful managers, the mavericks, and the manager of all the managers. She also worked hard to get the guys at the top of their game to name the up and coming newbies. Those people seeking to invest in the hedge fund world would be wise to watch the names of these “Picks” as Burton calls them. They are the 30 something managers who will be rocking the market in the very near future.

I recommend this book to anyone looking to invest in the hedge fund world, anyone desiring a career in this niche, or anyone who manages money for others. There are a lot of good insights, both humble and proud, into what it means to invest other people’s money. There is good discussion of pros and cons in the hedge fund world, and what needs to be done when you make that bad decision that costs a lot of money. It was interesting for me to read, as I work for a small fund manager, to see what the big boys do, and how they made it from million dollar companies to billion dollar companies. Hedge Hunters is an excellent resource and addition to the small library of fund management books.½

This book is a time capsule. It captures that moment, that exuberance, before the markets collapsed and before certain visionaries, like T. Boone Pickens, lost their shirts. The industry may never be the same, but I have a feeling the people will be.

I am pretty interested in financial stuff, so when I got the opportunity to review Hedge Hunters: Hedge Fund Masters on the Rewards, the Risk, and the Reckoning by Katherine Burton, I jumped at the chance. I am glad I did, because the book is entirely fascinating! The book is basically a collection of mini biographies of the best hedge fund managers around. They give their keys to success, how they've avoided disaster (for the most part), and their favorite managers. But, maybe we should start at the beginning.

A hedge fund, according to Wikipedia, is a private investment fund that charges a performance fee and management fee. In order to invest with a hedge fund you must qualify. In order to qualify you must have A LOT of money. Hedge funds manage billions of dollars, so they don't mess around with small time investors. As the book shows, there are a lot of different styles of hedge funds based on the level of risk/reward you (assuming you have millions and millions already!) are looking for.

Hedge Hunters is really interesting because it gets inside the office and gets personal with the managers. Why are these money managers so successful? As I said before, there are a wide variety of styles that these managers employ. Some are very conservative and don't promise huge returns. Some are far more willing to take risks in order to obtain massive returns. One consistentcy between all of the managers is that they aim to make money no matter what direction the market is going. Up or down...if they aren't profiting then they aren't happy.

Another consistency between all of these managers is how much time they take researching the companies and management. There are a lot of money managers out there on Wall Street and around the country/world...but it seems to me that the best ones are the ones who take their time and make the extra effort to really analyze a company. That is where they find the under and over valued companies to bet on. And that is where they make their money.

Burton does a fantastic job of keeping the book interesting and not just listing the record of the managers. Not all of their advice is meaningful to the normal investors of the world, but the basic premise of research and patience rings out throughout the book.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in investing and personal finance. You will learn something if you read this book!

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

(this and other reviews can be found at www.lettersonpages.com)½

Although the author provides unparalleled access to the thinking of 25 hedge fund greats she often misses the mark.

Hedge Fund managers are notorious for high returns and low profiles. Katherine Burton, who covers the hedge fund industry for Bloomberg News, provides the reader with access to these legends, but often fails to plumb the depths of their thinking.

The book is well-written. But I do not particularly care that the manager has boyish good-looks, is dressed in a suit or has holes in his blue jeans. From a book that carries this steep a price tag, I expect research methodologies, tips on mental preparation, trading tactics and logistics.

If you want to read breezy profiles, this book will suffice. If, however, you want to get under the covers, I would opt for Inside the House of Money by Steven Drobny.

Penned by the Pointed Pundit
October 27, 2007
12:55:08 PM

The format of the book gives you just a taste of each person profiled, but it is a great way to sample the different methods and maganement styles out there. While I didn't have any real knowledge of hedge funds, it was still easy to follow the book.

I enjoyed reading Hedge Hunters despite having little background in investing and knowing almost nothing about hedge funds. Katherine Burton is an agile journalist, able to deftly sketch interesting portraits of many of the successful men in the world of hedge funds. Although she makes connections between the different portraits, it is possible to begin with any portrait since she faithfully defines specialized terms in each chapter. If I had one wish now, it would be to read something that would tackle the question of the greater significance of hedge funds in history and for our times. I recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about investing and financial markets.

This is terrific work. In a collection of profiles of prominent hedge fund managers Burton succeeds in making her subjects lives and philosophies accessible while illustrating the different investing styles that the profiled hedge fund managers have used to achieve investing success for their businesses and their clients. There is a good flow to work in that each chapter has a similar structure and tone, and often a chapter prefaces the one that immediately follows or refers to others profiled elsewhere in the book. Each chapter is devoted to one or occasionally two successful men. Interviews with them by the author are distilled and combined with additional resources to illustrated a managers upbringing, career, influences, education, and offer details of the manager's investing philosophy. The work also is able to capture how markets have changed, how investing has changed, and how the hedge fun marketplace has changed over the past 30-40 years. I am rereading the book, being careful to jot down advice and tips for my own use this time.

This book, while not at all an explanation or exploration of how hedge funds work, is made up of interesting profiles of several successful money managers. I found it a bit tedious at times, and since it had no narrative to speak of found it much less interesting than books on similar subjects which portrayed events rather than simply profiling people.½

In the midst of the subprime mortgage meltdown, Bloomberg Press delivers this hagiography of hedge fund managers (excuse me, hedge fund MASTERS). Until I read this book, I had no clue how the pursuit of wealth accumulation in the context of a capitalist society could be so rebellious! In the preface alone, author Katherine Burton characterizes the hedge fund "mavens" portrayed in this book as "cowboys," "renegades," and "mavericks." These men (and yes, they are all men) might not actually rope cattle for living, but at least they dress like it. Marc Lasry, for instance, wears his sleeves "pushed up above the elbows as if he was preparing to do manual labor...." There are moments in this book, however, when absurdity borders on offensiveness. Burton occasionally underlines the risks involved in mastering hedge funds by claiming that the men she profiles are engaged in a struggle for "mere survival." Tell that to a family that has recently lost their home to foreclosure, or better yet, an inhabitant of the Democratic Republic of Congo whose government was pressured to make a $70 million settlement with "master of the universe" Craig Effron, who thinks it’s "kind of fun" to profit from third world debt.

Burton, a journalist for Bloomberg news, writes eighteen short profiles of some of the most important hedge fund investors working today including profiles of 13 up and comers picked by the master hedge fund investors themselves. I found the book somewhat informative as someone who is not very familiar with the world of Hedge Funds.

On the down side, many of the profiles were on the superficial side often dealing with the personal style and background of the investors. From the title I expected that the book would provide more critical analysis but the profiles were short, not particularly pithy and some of her insights were not particularly revelatory. For example that Good Hedge Fund Investors are smart, independent, ambitious and have lots of connections is not exactly news.

In short, this book would appeal to business people who would like an inspiring and not too long read. Unfortunately the title might imply a larger readership.

I am not someone that knows a lot about investing. I had not heard of anyone profiled in this book prior to reading it. However, due to Burton's excellent writing, I was able to feel connected to this distant world--if only for the length of her book. If nothing else, this was a fun read about investing. For anyone even remotely considering a career in a hedge fund, there is hope in this book as most of the successful people in the field come from a wide array of backgrounds and experiences. As someone just beginning a career, I find that sort of information useful.

The drawback to the book is the lack of overarching message about what makes hedge fund managers succeed in their careers. Is it the ability of the individual to be contrarian? Is it their interpersonal skills? Are they fortune-tellers? Luck? Burton gets somewhat close to answering this question with each interview, but falls short of providing a comprehensive theme. Thus, the book is clunky and seems disjointed--each chapter could live independent of the others rather than flowing seemlessly.

Still, if you want an easy overview of what hedge fund managers do each day and how they got there, this is a good weekend read.½

Not my favorite of books. I think it would have been better if they had picked fewer hedge fund managers and gone more in-depth on those. Each of the chapters read like a short magazine piece. Even some of the explanations of the financial terms were repeated as if the chapters were written completely independently.

This book is basically a biography of all of the top Hedge Fund operators. It is very interesting to see how all of them got their start. What impressed me the most is that the "top" hedge funds are managed by people from very different backgrounds and with totally different philosophies on how to make money. Each person is highly successful - but no one uses the same approach to making money and they do.

Katherine Burton does a wonderful job of giving just the right amount of information to keep it as interesting as the people she is describing.

What Hedge Hunters Is: The book looks at about twenty hedge fund investors that have been actively trading for at least the past ten years. There are mini-profiles with background info that are the length of an article one would see in a business magazine like Fortune or BusinessWeek. There is an overview of their investing philosophy and how they've done on some past deals. Some even opine about the future. It is very interesting to see the different strategies and beliefs these investors have.

What Hedge Hunters Is Not: It is not a dense book with graphs, technical details and charts with nitty-gritty entry and exit points covering when to buy or sell. If that is what you're looking for this book does not go that deep.

Overall, it's a good book for someone trying to get an idea about what hedge funds do.

Katherine Burton (Bloomberg News) has produced a classic, by interviewing hedge fund masters, that is informatory, entertaining and revelatory. Eighteen chapters cover as many hedge fund managers including stars like Julian Robertson, Jim Chanos. Marc Lasry of Avenue Capital merits a chapter, as does Craig Effron of Scoggin. There is a fantastic account of how Effron bought $150mm debt of the Republic of Congo from Brazil at $.05 on the dollar, spent $11mm in legal bills and collected $70mm from the reluctant Congolese.
We learn that John Armitage does not like to short stocks and that Effron prefers buying puts on the S&P 500 index, since "fifteen stocks that you short, if you do, could all stay put on a day when the index drops 2%".

You get a unique insight into how some fund managers alter the fee strucutre (1% and 20% or 1% and 15%) and the implications of the make-whole clause on staff retention, the ability to pay salaries, and to stay afloat.

A fantastic introduction, based on views of Mark Yusko, rate attributes that it takes to be the best in the business: Independence, Guts, Humility and intellectual honesty, Connections, Ambitions, Smarts, Respect for Employees, Integrity. Interestingly there are red flags too: "The Red Ferrari Syndrome", "Calling In Rich", "Personal Tragedy".

This is much more than a investment classic. It is a entertaining and readable account, (assuming very little knowledge of financial jargon besides what a reader of the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg News would be familiar with,) providing unprecedented access to the business models that comprise successful funds with consistent returns over decades. Top managers' views of risk control, or "looking out for what is around the corner" in addition to intense study of "fundamentals for stock-picking" are presented. It is this awareness of risk and leverage that separate the funds that blow-up from the funds that consistently perform.

The quality of research and the standard of writing is high.

This book is to hedge fund managers and to this decade what Jack Schwager's "Market Wizards" was to option traders and the last decade.

Highly enjoyable, and a pleasure to recommend.

Katherine Burton does a fine, journalistic job at introducing the reader to the world of Hedge Funds.

This is a quick read filled with profiles of some of the best in the business from the pioneers like Michael Steinhardt, Julian Robertson and Boone Pickens to the younger managers they mentored.

For anyone who would like an easily digestible and entertaining introduction to the way these masters approach their "art of investing" this could be the book to read.

An interseting touch are the vignettes of how these investors got started, several of them falling into the hedge fund game by accident. They all seem to share the gamblers touch and and an analytic approach to making money.

In addition to the profiles one also gets a glimpse of the different styles these managers take. There are different approaches some more conservative than others. the reader is educated to these different approaches and how one can build a portfolio of investments.

For anyone interested in investments and the world of finance this is an easy, enjoyable read - very much like an extended magazine piece.

Hedge Hunters is an entertaining yet deceptively shallow book. Given the subject, title, and background of the author, one might assume or hope that the book will contain a lot of deep material on the strategy or operations of running a hedge fund. This is not the case. If you are looking for an in-depth study of technique, you will likely be disappointed. If you have already read other books about hedge funds, this book will probably add little to your knowledge of the subject.

However, if you are interested in reading about the people at the helm of the funds, this book hits the mark. You'll be surprised to learn the routes that many of them have taken to become hedge fund managers. Depending on what you have read in the past or what impressions you have of hedge fund managers, you may also be surprised at the candor and honesty with which they discuss their field. I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys reading the biographies of successful investors and managers.½