Customer Reviews

Managing a Hedge Fund: A Complete Guide to Trading, Business Strategies, Risk Management, and Regulations

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I am afraid I have to agree with the review here of Robert Altena wholeheartedly. This book simply describes the very basics of several investment strategies (most of which have existed for decades). Hedge funds have long ago moved beyond any of these strategies, although the obviously still employ all of them as a bulk of their operations, and they constantly move into uncharted territory. That is what is separating the top funds from the `pretenders' nowadays.

If these strategies are new to you and/or if you actually learned anything new from this book then you have NO business trying to start a hedge fund. Of course if you need to buy a book to consider doing so, then you are really in trouble anyways. This book is useful however for anyone that is considering putting their money with [reputable] hedge fund managers and therefore need to educate themselves on various basic strategies the funds may employ (thus why I gave it 2 stars instead of 0 or 1).

I think Mr. Black is an excellent professor and his writing in this book is pretty good, but the title is very misleading. A more accurate title may have been: The Basic Hedge Fund Strategy for Investors. For those who already work at buy-side institutions (or serious prop traders at bulge bracket firms), if you plan to branch out on your own please do not think ANY book will aid you in your quest. Instead, if you need insight into risk management, quant, partnership accounting, etc. in order to complete your education BEFORE starting a fund (recommended that you do!), then consider reviewing published industry papers from Wharton, MIT, Cal Tech, Chicago B.S., HBS, NYU, etc. (I would put particular concentration on the top finance and tech schools and not the top management schools - MIT, Wharton, NYU, etc.) These offer the best academic insight into how funds should be managed, in theory anyhow, in truly technical jargon. If you can't understand the jargon, then stick with working with your broker or day trading because starting a hedge fund will only put you into bankruptcy.

If you aren't familiar with hedge funds and need a book that explains it in layman's terms, this is the book for you. The title is a little misleading since it should be more appropriately named "A Primer on Hedge Funds" The author introduces what hedge funds are and its affects on portfolio performance and then explains various hedge fund strategies and how to measure hedge fund performance. The wealth of data presented in the book is well worth the money by itself. The author presents information such as tables on the Sharpe Ratios by strategy, Sortino Ratios by strategy, as well as correlations of the various hedge fund strategies to each other and to the S&P 500 during up and down markets and to the MSCI Debt index in up and down markets. The text is well written and an easy read. If you want more details on hedge funds in highly quantitative terms and have the background to understand them then you're better off reading articles from the Journal of Finance, Journal of Derivatives, Journal of Fixed Income, or other publications of this nature. Overall, if you are new to hedge funds and want to get your bearings on this hot topic, then this book is an excellent starting point.

This book is OK, not horrible, not great, just OK. It's a bit more "dense" than I imagined and it reads more like a college or law school textbook rather an informative, concise manual. I felt like I was reading a series of case studies and laws more than a book that I could use on a daily basis as a reference guide. There's good information in here, but you will have to sort through A LOT of different items to get to the individual nuggets that you need.

Mr. Black's book on hedge funds offers a straightforward no-nonsense approach to understanding hedge funds. The book is written in such a way that a person not enrolled in a masters degree in finance can get a basic understanding of fees, the various strategies and the required due diligence of the funds. As hedge funds are obviously becoming more and more mainstream, it is imperative that the general public has a source, which describes to them how hedge funds work and how it applies directly to them. This book is said source and should be viewed as such.

As a student of Mr. Black's and of the school where he teaches, I have found him insightful and inspiring during lectures. He combines current market trends and various hedge fund scandals into the discussion making the topic come alive and real. In my opinion, he is an asset to the school and any student who has the opportunity to take his course should seize it!

Bought this book based on some of the rave reviews read in here. Could not be more dissapointed. I threw in the towel after 4 chapters. There was nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing in there that was worth any of my time.

Do we really need to define the return on a long trade and the return on a short trade? Some other paper-fillers: The definition of drawdown and "Percent winning months". No offense, but if you cannot figure these out by yourself, then your money should be in a postal savings account, not in a hedge fund. And you should not be considering starting a hedge fund.

Conclusion: Do not buy this book.

What a joy it was to read Keith Black's book.

It is clearly written, covers a wide range of important areas and moves appropriately from simplicity to complexity and back. I am also quite impressed by the amount of visual elements complimenting the text. It will stimulate the neurons on both sides of the reader's brain!

Keith Black's work is best written book I've read on hedge funds to date!

I read this book and found it to be a good complement to all the bits and pieces of the hedge fund industry floating around. You can never find a complete guide but this book puts it all together. My fiance (N.Fok) actually learned from Keith Black (now a professor at IIT, a university in Chicago that is one of the highly rated financial engineering programs). My fiance used to rave about his professor by himself. Now I rave with him. I work at a buy side shop and found this book to be very helpful in understanding strategies and the background of hedge funds.

Hedge funds can be arcane and complicated investments, and difficult to understand. Black is able to sift through all the complexity and lay the "parts on the table" for analysis. At a time when the interest in alternative investments is gaining momentum, readers of this book will benefit from Black's excellent guidance on the subject. It provides in-depth background for investors who want to enter the alternatives world, and entrepreneurial investment manangers that are ready to start their own hedge funds.

Its clear now that hedge funds and alternative investment strategies are the wave of the future. The billions of dollars invested to date are just the tip of the iceberg. So, you either learn the material in this book or fall behind. It's that simple. Black's thorough look at the burgeoning hedge fund industry provides a wealth of information on investment strategies, performance evaluation and regulation ( both U.S. and offshore ) in a way that is at the same time very informative and very readable. Regardless of your area of expertise, the breadth of this book will undoubtedly provide tremendous value.

The MS program at the school where Keith Black teaches finance is far from good and totally pathetic. The program director at this school John Bilson and Dean Zia Hasssan individually or as a faculty group lacks the edge and seriousness to run a full fledged program. They had no time or showed any inclination to grade student test papers. The course ciuricullum is vague and they avoided teaching intricate mathematical models to students. These models have been the foundation for evolution of hedge funds or in the development of advanced portfolio managment techniques. Therefore the classroom projects used by this author is a poorly conceived idea for writing a book on such critical topic in finance. To understand hedge funds and to gain expertise it is absolutely not necessarty to even touch such a book. There are definitely better written books.