More Money Than God
Hedge Funds and the Making of the New Elite
(Sprache: Englisch)
"Splendid...the definitive history of the hedge fund, a compelling narrative full of larger-than-life characters and dramatic tales." -The Washington Post
Wealthy, powerful, and potentially dangerous, hedge fund moguls have become the It Boys of...
Wealthy, powerful, and potentially dangerous, hedge fund moguls have become the It Boys of...
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"Splendid...the definitive history of the hedge fund, a compelling narrative full of larger-than-life characters and dramatic tales." -The Washington Post Wealthy, powerful, and potentially dangerous, hedge fund moguls have become the It Boys of twenty-first- century capitalism. Beating the market was long thought to be impossible, but hedge funds cracked its mysteries and made fortunes in the process. Drawing on his unprecedented access to the industry, esteemed financial writer Sebastian Mallaby tells the inside story of the hedge funds, from their origins in the 1960s to their role in the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009.
Read Sebastian Mallaby's new book, The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan.
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Introduction: The Alpha Game The first hedge-fund manager, Alfred Winslow Jones, did not go to business school. He did not possess a PhD in quantitative finance. He did not spend his formative years at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, or any other incubator for masters of the universe. Instead, he took a job on a tramp steamer, studied at the Marxist Workers School in Berlin, and ran secret missions for a clandestine anti-Nazi group called the Leninist Organization. He married, divorced, and married again, honeymooning on the front lines of the civil war in Spain, traveling and drinking with Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway. It was only at the advanced age of forty-eight that Jones raked together $100,000 to set up a hedged fund, generating extraordinary profits through the 1950s and 1960s. Almost by accident, Jones improvised an investment structure that has endured to this day. It will thrive for years to come, despite a cacophony of naysayers.
Half a century after Jones created his hedge fund, a young man named Clifford Asness followed in his footsteps. Asness did attend a business school. He did acquire a PhD in quantitative finance. He did work for Goldman Sachs, and he was a master of the universe. Whereas Jones had launched his venture in his mature, starched-collar years, Asness rushed into the business at the grand old age of thirty-one, beating all records for a new start-up by raising an eye-popping $1 billion. Whereas Jones had been discreet about his methods and the riches that they brought, Asness was refreshingly open, tearing up his schedule to do TV interviews and confessing to the New York Times that it doesn t suck to be worth millions.By the eve of the subprime mortgage crash in 2007, Asness s firm, AQR Capital Management, was running a remarkable $38 billion and Asness himself personified the new globe-changing finance. He was irreverent, impatient, and scarcely even bothered to pretend to be grown up. He had a collection of
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plastic superheroes in his office.
Asness freely recognized his debt to Jones s improvisation. His hedge funds, like just about all hedge funds, embraced four features that Jones had combined to spectacular effect. To begin with, there was a performance fee: Jones kept one fifth of the fund s investment profits for himself and his team, a formula that sharpened the incentives of his lieutenants. Next, Jones made a conscious effort to avoid regulatory red tape, preserving the flexibility to shape-shift from one investment method to the next as market opportunities mutated. But most important, from Asness s perspective, were two ideas that had framed Jones s investment portfolio. Jones had balanced purchases of promising shares with short selling of unpromising ones, meaning that he borrowed and sold them, betting that they would fall in value. By being long some stocks and short others, he insulated his fund at least partially from general market swings; and having hedged out market risk in this fashion, he felt safe in magnifying, or leveraging, his bets with borrowed money. As we will see in the next chapter, this combination of hedging and leverage had a magical effect on Jones s portfolio of stocks. But its true genius was the one that Asness emphasized later: The same combination could be applied to bonds, futures, swaps, and options and indeed to any mixture of these instruments. More by luck than by design, Jones had invented a platform for strategies more complex than he himself could dream of.
No definition of hedge funds is perfect, and not all the adventures recounted in this book involve hedging and leverage. When George Soros and Stan Druckenmiller broke the British pound, or when John Paulson shorted the mortgage bubble in the United States, there was no particular need to hedge as we shall see late
Asness freely recognized his debt to Jones s improvisation. His hedge funds, like just about all hedge funds, embraced four features that Jones had combined to spectacular effect. To begin with, there was a performance fee: Jones kept one fifth of the fund s investment profits for himself and his team, a formula that sharpened the incentives of his lieutenants. Next, Jones made a conscious effort to avoid regulatory red tape, preserving the flexibility to shape-shift from one investment method to the next as market opportunities mutated. But most important, from Asness s perspective, were two ideas that had framed Jones s investment portfolio. Jones had balanced purchases of promising shares with short selling of unpromising ones, meaning that he borrowed and sold them, betting that they would fall in value. By being long some stocks and short others, he insulated his fund at least partially from general market swings; and having hedged out market risk in this fashion, he felt safe in magnifying, or leveraging, his bets with borrowed money. As we will see in the next chapter, this combination of hedging and leverage had a magical effect on Jones s portfolio of stocks. But its true genius was the one that Asness emphasized later: The same combination could be applied to bonds, futures, swaps, and options and indeed to any mixture of these instruments. More by luck than by design, Jones had invented a platform for strategies more complex than he himself could dream of.
No definition of hedge funds is perfect, and not all the adventures recounted in this book involve hedging and leverage. When George Soros and Stan Druckenmiller broke the British pound, or when John Paulson shorted the mortgage bubble in the United States, there was no particular need to hedge as we shall see late
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Autoren-Porträt von Sebastian Mallaby
Sebastian Mallaby is the author of several books, including The Power Law, More Money Than God, The Man Who Knew, and The World's Banker. A former Financial Times contributing editor and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Sebastian Mallaby
- 2011, 512 Seiten, Masse: 21,2 x 13,8 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: Penguin US
- ISBN-10: 0143119419
- ISBN-13: 9780143119418
- Erscheinungsdatum: 06.05.2011
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
The bright light shed by More Money Than God is particularly welcome. Mr. Mallaby . . . brings a keen sense of financial theory to his subject and a vivid narrative style. Wall Street Journal Splendid . . . the definitive history of the hedge fund history, a compelling narrative full of larger-than-life characters and dramatic tales of their financial triumphs and reversals . . . Mallaby weaves into his narrative just the right amount of economic theory and market history, and he has a wonderful knack for explaining complex trading strategies in simple and elegant prose. The Washington Post
[A] splendid account of the ups and downs of an industry in which few of the twenty-something hedge-fund wannabes know their history. They, and meddling politicians, should read this book before they are condemned to repeat it. The Financial Times
Mallaby's book is informative and entertaining. Newsweek
More Money Than God is an expert primer on America's most obscenely lucrative investment tool . . . [Mallaby is] incisive, informative, and as good a financial writer as he is a storyteller. NPR's All Things Considered
In More Money Than God, his smart history of the hedge fund business, Mallaby does more than explain how finance's richest moguls made their loot. He argues that the obsessive, charismatic oddballs of the hedge fund world are Wall Street's future-and possibly its salvation. The New York Times Book Review
Sebastian Mallaby's history of hedge funds is well written, smart, and balanced. Greg Mankiw
Sebastian Mallaby's in-depth research and clear writing style is engaging . . . With great insight into the lucrative world of hedge funds, More Money Than God is one of the best, most engrossing of the current financial books. The Finance Professional's Post (A publication of the New York Society of Security Analysts)
[A] superb book.
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David Brooks, The New York Times
Mallaby . . . effectively combines an insider's knowledge with a colorful storytelling ability . . . A lively, provocative examination of a little-understood financial realm. Kirkus
A superbly researched history of hedge-fund heroes stretching back to the 1950s, it is a fascinating tale of the contrarian and cerebral misfits who created successful, flexible businesses in an otherwise conventional financial world. The Economist
More Money Than God shines a fascinating light on what is still the most obscure route to becoming a billionaire the mysterious world of hedge funds. Sebastian Mallaby's rollicking tour of industry legends famous and otherwise tells the improbable story of A.W. Jones, the vagabond journalist-sociologist and daring anti-Nazi activist who, after the war, would create the first 'hedged' investment fund. From there, we get rip-roaring profiles of investing titans from the full-throated gambler Michael Steinhardt to the bold TmigrT George Soros and the courtly stockpicker Julian Robertson to the ill-fated intellects of LTCM and the hedge fund stars of the present day. Even as Mallaby entertains he advances an unorthodox yet compelling brief: rich as they are, hedge funds are probably the best vehicles society has for assuming risk. Any who disagree will have to contend with the evidence of the recent Wall Street collapse. If one shudders at the prospect of concentrating risk inside giant banks whose chieftains wager other people's money and cavalierly call for taxpayer bailouts then, as Mallaby points out, hedge funds are a necessary antidote. Roger Lowenstein, author of America's Bank
Sebastian Mallaby takes us into the secretive world of hedge funds and the result is a wonderful story and an education in finance. The book is full of colorful characters playing high stakes' games. Throughout, with his customary intelligence, Mallaby helps us understand this important transformation of the financial industry. Fareed Zakaria, author of The Post American World
When Alfred Winslow Jones started the first hedge fund, he had no idea where it would lead. Sebastian Mallaby, who must be the keenest student of hedge funds anywhere, now does and he shares it with you in this crackling good read. Dr. Alan S. Blinder, Professor of Economics, Princeton University, and Former Vice Chairman, Federal Reserve
A fascinating history. Mallaby combines vivid description of key personalities and episodes with thoughtful discussion of the sources of advantage for different investment styles in different periods of financial history. I enthusiastically recommend this book to colleagues and students in academia and asset management. John Y. Campbell, Chairman of the Department of Economics, Harvard University, and Partner, Arrowstreet Capital
Mallaby . . . effectively combines an insider's knowledge with a colorful storytelling ability . . . A lively, provocative examination of a little-understood financial realm. Kirkus
A superbly researched history of hedge-fund heroes stretching back to the 1950s, it is a fascinating tale of the contrarian and cerebral misfits who created successful, flexible businesses in an otherwise conventional financial world. The Economist
More Money Than God shines a fascinating light on what is still the most obscure route to becoming a billionaire the mysterious world of hedge funds. Sebastian Mallaby's rollicking tour of industry legends famous and otherwise tells the improbable story of A.W. Jones, the vagabond journalist-sociologist and daring anti-Nazi activist who, after the war, would create the first 'hedged' investment fund. From there, we get rip-roaring profiles of investing titans from the full-throated gambler Michael Steinhardt to the bold TmigrT George Soros and the courtly stockpicker Julian Robertson to the ill-fated intellects of LTCM and the hedge fund stars of the present day. Even as Mallaby entertains he advances an unorthodox yet compelling brief: rich as they are, hedge funds are probably the best vehicles society has for assuming risk. Any who disagree will have to contend with the evidence of the recent Wall Street collapse. If one shudders at the prospect of concentrating risk inside giant banks whose chieftains wager other people's money and cavalierly call for taxpayer bailouts then, as Mallaby points out, hedge funds are a necessary antidote. Roger Lowenstein, author of America's Bank
Sebastian Mallaby takes us into the secretive world of hedge funds and the result is a wonderful story and an education in finance. The book is full of colorful characters playing high stakes' games. Throughout, with his customary intelligence, Mallaby helps us understand this important transformation of the financial industry. Fareed Zakaria, author of The Post American World
When Alfred Winslow Jones started the first hedge fund, he had no idea where it would lead. Sebastian Mallaby, who must be the keenest student of hedge funds anywhere, now does and he shares it with you in this crackling good read. Dr. Alan S. Blinder, Professor of Economics, Princeton University, and Former Vice Chairman, Federal Reserve
A fascinating history. Mallaby combines vivid description of key personalities and episodes with thoughtful discussion of the sources of advantage for different investment styles in different periods of financial history. I enthusiastically recommend this book to colleagues and students in academia and asset management. John Y. Campbell, Chairman of the Department of Economics, Harvard University, and Partner, Arrowstreet Capital
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