Customer Reviews

How to Create and Manage a Hedge Fund: A Professional's Guide

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

A lot of great commentary about the preparation and hard work to build a business, not just trade/manage money. The other reviews listed here correctly point out that this is not another instructional book with investment techniques. This is the ideal book for someone confident enough with their investing strategy be it equities, bonds, limited partnerships, real estate, futures, commodities etc. to grasp business structures, investor/customer expectation, realistic marketing timelines, accounting, and the business aspect of managing a fund. Expect to seek out additional resources to add on McRary's outstanding work. If you are even toying with the idea of starting a mangement company, fund, fund of funds etc. do not proceed without this book.

If you are a professional investor or trader don't buy this book. You won't learn anything particularly useful. The only information that was of any use pertained to the "creation" aspect, but this was too brief to be of any real use. On the "managing" side of things it went into a lot of subjects that were applicable to portfolio management in general rather than exclusively to hedge funds. Anyone who is thinking of setting up a hedge fund will have been running a long only fund or trading a book long enough to know all of this.

Informative and easy to read for the lay person, private investor or student, but of no practical use to anyone who might actually be looking to set up their own fund. Certainly not a professional's guide.

Years ago I swore never to read another book with the words "How To" in the title. I broke that rule and am now very sorry I did. To be fair, there are a couple of good chapters in this book. Chapter 10 on regulation is a nice overview of the subject, and chapter 12 makes a valiant effort, but ultimately fails to make hedge fund taxation lucid. Unfortunately much of the book is unabashed filler. Chapter 11 is titled "Accounting for Hedge Funds", but is instead a 15 page overview of the first week of Freshman level accounting. Chapter 15 takes ten pages to explain the obvious and intuitive parallels of hedge fund cash flows to options. I got about 60 pages of applicable information on the subject out of a 300 page book, and still feel ripped off. Why is it that there are so many terrible books about money management?

For those readers interested in running money through a hedge fund this is an okay book. (Note: For those interested in running money through a mutual fund, I recommend Start a Successful Mutual Fund by Melinda Gerber.)

Mr. McCrary's book discusses broad topics about the industry but also covers some things that can be learned better from a specialty book about marketing or business plan writing. It does not mention how hedge funds are getting into private equity, prime brokers, Sarbanes-Oxley, or the Anti-Money Laundering Act. It is also weak on specific details about how to run a fund day-to-day.

In general the book reminded me of a college textbook. It is most valuable to anyone who wants a good beginning knowledge of hedge funds.

This book only gives a brief overview to the actual nuts and bolts of starting a hedge fund. Instead it spends time explaining various hedge fund strategies, risk-management approaches, and basic entity structures (what is a c-corp? what is an s-corp? what is an llc?).

As someone who has started a fund in the past and is looking to start another, this book was a disappointment. If you are learning the info in this book for the first time, you probably shouldn't be starting a fund in the first place.

Tells you everything you need to know; however you will still need a good lawyer to set you up properly. I bought the book first, and then still spent tens of thousands of dollars to set up my fund.

While I wasn't expecting much, from reading the mediocre reviews posted here, I was surprised to find fairly decent amount of valuable information in the book, albeit for a novice in the hedge fund world.

For instance, the structure of a hedge fund was explained to me by one of the best lawyers who specializes in setting up hedge funds, here on the west coast. The charts that were used in the book mirrored the thoughts of the lawyer.

Within the last 2 years, the industry has changed drastically and quickly that some issues/rules/regulations are outdated. I would recommend this book for the reader who is looking at a hedge fund for the very first time.

While admittedly there is a lot of fluff in this book - ie explaining strategy and instruments, there is a lot of valuable advise on creating the structure of the company and constructing a business plan.

If your looking for someone to tell you how to trade in the financial markets you probably shouldn't be starting a fund.

I did not read the book word for word as I was familiar with most of what it contained. However, had I had this book when I first started in the industry it would have saved me a lot of time and effort digging for information.

If you want to start a Hedge Fund this is the book to begin with. It outlines all the different aspects of the industry that you have to think about before making your decision and set up the whole thing. Good luck!