Enjoy fast, free delivery, exclusive deals, and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime
and start saving today with fast, free delivery
Amazon Prime includes:
Fast, FREE Delivery is available to Prime members. To join, select "Try Amazon Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery" below the Add to Cart button.
Amazon Prime members enjoy:- Cardmembers earn 5% Back at Amazon.com with a Prime Credit Card.
- Unlimited Free Two-Day Delivery
- Streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows with limited ads on Prime Video.
- A Kindle book to borrow for free each month - with no due dates
- Listen to over 2 million songs and hundreds of playlists
- Unlimited photo storage with anywhere access
Important: Your credit card will NOT be charged when you start your free trial or if you cancel during the trial period. If you're happy with Amazon Prime, do nothing. At the end of the free trial, your membership will automatically upgrade to a monthly membership.
Buy new:
-36% $10.29$10.29
Ships from: Amazon.com Sold by: Amazon.com
Save with Used - Acceptable
$8.60$8.60
Ships from: Amazon Sold by: -OnTimeBooks-
Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.
Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Follow the authors
OK
Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager Paperback – June 22, 2010
Purchase options and add-ons
“Diary of a Very Bad Year is a rarity: a book on modern finance that’s both extraordinarily thoughtful and enormously entertaining.”
— James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds
“A great read. . . . HFM offers a brilliant financial professional’s view of the economic situation in real time, from September 2007, when problems in financial markets began to surface, until late summer 2009.”
— Booklist
“n+1 is the rightful heir to Partisan Review and the New York Review of Books. It is rigorous, curious and provocative.”
— Malcolm Gladwell
A profoundly candid and captivating account of the economic crisis and subprime mortgage collapse, from an anonymous hedge fund manager, as told to the editors of New York literary magazine n+1.
- Print length260 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateJune 22, 2010
- Dimensions5.31 x 0.61 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100061965308
- ISBN-13978-0061965302
The Amazon Book Review
Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more. Read it now
Frequently bought together

Similar items that may ship from close to you
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Review
“My favorite book written about the financial crisis. . . . Highly recommended.” — Ezra Klein, The Washington Post
“Diary of a Very Bad Year is a rarity: a book on modern finance that’s both extraordinarily thoughtful and enormously entertaining.” — James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds
“A highly readable refresher on the financial crisis. . . . Amazingly―and largely because of the anonymity he’s granted―the nameless hedgie gives straight answers. . . . While HFM comes off as a bro you don’t want to mess with, the book is packed with plenty of humor.” — The Wall Street Journal
“Eminently readable. . . . Always engaging. . . . Although it is not fiction, Diary of a Very Bad Year is, in its own way, an attempt to bridge the gulf between the literary and financial worlds.” — Financial Times
“Diary of a Very Bad Year does something few of the books written about the crisis have accomplished: It delivers an insider perspective on the events in real time, rather than dwelling on conclusions reached after the fact.” — BusinessWeek
“HFM does a good job of teaching the reader how mortgage-backed paper, money-market funds, and credit-default swaps work, while offering up juicier tidbits about the ethics and legalities of his sector.” — Time Out New York
“Diary of a Very Bad Year takes the first steps toward putting a human face on the funds.” — Newsweek
“A great read. . . . HFM offers a brilliant financial professional’s view of the economic situation in real time, from September 2007, when problems in financial markets began to surface, until late summer 2009.” — Booklist
“A wonderful book. Diary of a Very Bad Year is a fascinating commentary on the crisis and a great read.” — David Backus, Professor of Economics and Finance, NYU’s Stern School of Business
“Thoughtful, funny and unpretentious. . . . An unexpected treat that belongs on the shelf once labeled belles-lettres. . . . It is plenty enjoyable to watch HFM’s mind unfurl.” — Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“A short, illuminating set of interviews with one savvy, articulate Wall Streeter. . . . A penetrating, educational and at times harrowing play-by-play.” — Time magazine
“n+1 (in the person of Keith Gessen) lends an outsider’s ear to the brilliant disquisitions of a guy caught in the middle of it all. . . . Excellent reading. . . . Compelling.” — The Millions
From the Back Cover
The First Book from n+1—an Essential Chronicle of Our Financial Crisis
HFM: Where are you going to buy protection on the U.S. government's credit? I mean, if the U.S. defaults, what bank is going to be able to make good on that contract? Who are you going to buy that contract from, the Martians?
n+1: When does this begin to feel like less of a cyclical thing, like the weather, and more of a permanent, end-of-the-world kind of thing?
HFM: When you see me selling apples out on the street, that's when you should go stock up on guns and ammunition.
About the Author
n+1 is a twice-yearly print journal of politics, literature, and culture. Founded in 2004, it has been praised by the New York Times, TLS, Boston Globe, and Le Revue Des Deux Mondes, and reviled by the New Criterion and Gawker. In 2006 it won the Utne Independent Press Award for Best Writing. An anthology of its most significant essays was published in 2008 by Suhrkamp, in German.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper Perennial; 1st edition (June 22, 2010)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 260 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0061965308
- ISBN-13 : 978-0061965302
- Item Weight : 7.7 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.31 x 0.61 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #126,640 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #205 in Investment Analysis & Strategy
- #467 in Budgeting & Money Management (Books)
- #528 in Introduction to Investing
- Customer Reviews:
About the authors

n+1 is a print and digital magazine of literature, culture, and politics published three times a year. We also post new online-only work several times each week and publish books expanding on the interests of the magazine.
Praise for n+1:
"n+1 has reinvented the little magazine."
--Toril Moi
"An island of hope in a sea of inanity."
--Nancy Fraser
"A concentration of work without precedent or equal in the US or anywhere else."
--Francis Mulhern, New Left Review
"The rightful heir to the Partisan Review and The New York Review of Books. It is rigorous, curious, and provocative."
--Malcolm Gladwell
"One of the consistently excellent periodicals of the last decade."
--Pankaj Mishra
"A lively, stimulating magazine of a rare intellectual scope."
--Joyce Carol Oates
"Just when you think you’re intellectually alone in the world, something like n+1 falls into your hands."
--Jonathan Franzen
"So many good writers have come tumbling out of that small journal in the past few years that it’s begun to resemble an intellectual clown car."
--The New York Times
"The best goddamn literary magazine in America."
--Mary Karr
"I think I’m in more danger from n+1 than from al Qaeda."
--Salman Rushdie
You can read more about us, browse web-only content, and find contact information at www.nplusonemag.com.

Keith Gessen was born in Moscow in 1975 and came to the United States with his family when he was six years old. He is a co-founder of the literary magazine n+1 and the author of the novels All the Sad Young Literary Men and A Terrible Country. He has written about Russia for the London Review of Books, n+1, the Nation, the New Yorker, and the New York Times Magazine, and has translated or co-translated several books from Russian, including Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich, There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, and It's No Good by Kirill Medvedev. He is also the editor of the n+1 books What We Should Have Known, Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager, and City by City. He lives in New York with his wife, the author and publisher Emily Gould, and their son, Raphy, who likes squishy candy.
Customer reviews
Our goal is to make sure every review is trustworthy and useful. That's why we use both technology and human investigators to block fake reviews before customers ever see them. Learn more
We block Amazon accounts that violate our community guidelines. We also block sellers who buy reviews and take legal actions against parties who provide these reviews. Learn how to report
Reviews with images
-
Top reviews
Top reviews from the United States
There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.
A must read, this book ranks as high as "The Quants", "Pit Bull" and "Market Wizards" for me, all three books I thoroughly enjoyed reading. You will gain rare insights into the mind/workings of a successful and relatively conservative (compared to his peers) hedge fund manager, Wall Street risk takers (with OPM other people's money), the Fed and Treasury's crisis management modus operandi.
There are some particularly valuable conversations that illustrate, through examples, the risk magnification from instruments that become illiquid combined with leverage. In a panic, the interviewee points out how contracts (such as for collateral haircuts, or funding commitment period) may not be honored (a law suit will be irrelevant because it will not save the fund in time), how word gets around the market and, together with asset liquidations and investor withdrawal restrictions, causes a rapid, downward spiral.
There were also some interesting observations, that you wouldn't necessarily know without being in the industry. One was that, at the time of the Lehman collapse, arbitrage trades unusually existed for which very few players had the capital to be able to take advantage, such as simple covered interest arbitrage (buying a high quality foreign government bond and hedging out the FX exposure, which should produce a return close to U.S. Treasuries). The "basis" (difference between the U.S. Treasury and the hedged foreign government investment) between the two moved out from the usual 2 basis points (2/100ths of 1%) to 20 b.p.s That's something, I'm sure, a better-capitalized bank like JPMorgan Chase was able to use to considerable profit advantage.
If you have a interest in the day-to-day workings of hedge funds (and bank prime-brokerage), perhaps as a credit officer, a internal audit professional or a regulator, I thoroughly recommend the book. It's a relatively quick read and the anonymous hedge fund manager is a smart and thoughtful person who gives many highly insightful comments.










