More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite (Council on Foreign Relations Books (Penguin Press)) Paperback – Illustrated, May 31, 2011

This is the magnum opus on the hedge fund industry. As other hedge fund related books seek to either vilify the industry or brazenly praise the uncanny good fortunes industry insiders - this book does neither - which I found refreshing and a strategic positioning of this work from "the rest."Sebastian Mallaby is currently the Paul Volcker Senior Fellow for International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations. He's also a columnist at the WA Post and spent over a decade with The Economist responsible for international finance coverage - serving a bureau chief in Washington, Japan and southern Africa. He is the author of several noteworthy books on the political economy.This work is an epic contribution to the historical evolution of certain financial products and the global industry(s) spawned therefrom in primarily, the western world. Welcome to the hedge fund industry, including an amazing cast of characters, their thought processes, training, relationships and the outcome of their work - The Making of A New Elite - with More Money Than God.Admittedly, it is rare for me to dedicate myself to the reading of 400+ pages contained in any one volume, on any subject. Yet, the manner in which this book develops contains the unique qualities that inflame the desire within reader to come back for more. Incredibly well-written, researched, balanced and apolitical. This work is REQUIRED READING as an essential component in developing an understanding of global financial markets, risk assessment, risk management and the art of speculation.As I read the book, Mallaby makes some points that have been central themes of other authors (See The WSJ's Scott Patterson's - The QUANTS), regarding the miscues that fueled poor investment/risk management strategies. Listen to Mallaby to garner the essence of this observation as it relates to the "art of speculation" - "The art of speculation is to develop one insight that others have overlooked and then trade big on that small advantage." P.91"After the 1971 debacle, Weymar set about rethinking his theory of the market. He had begun with an economist's faith in model building and data: Prices reflected the fundamental forces supply and demand, so if you could anticipate those things - you were your way to riches. But experience had taught him some humility. An exaggerated faith in data could turn out to be a curse, breeding the Sol of hubris that leads you into trading positions too big to be sustainable.""The real lesson of LTCM's failure was not that its approach to risk was too simple. It was that all attempts to be precise about risk are unavoidably brittle." P.231(LTCM) Had misjudged the precision with which financial risk can be measured."p.245.The point is that an unrepentant belief in the quantitative modeling that provides that "one insight that others have overlooked and then trade big on it" can have enormous consequences in either capturing returns or accelerating a cataclysmic demise of the capital under management.How has that all worked out, in recent years? According to Mallaby, "Between 2000 and 2009, a total of about five thousand hedge funds went out of business, and not a single one required a taxpayer bailout."Ah yes, "bailouts" - what is Mallaby's take on this issue? Listen to the following: "Capitalism works only when institutions are forced to absorb the consequences of the risks that they take on. When banks can pocket the upside while spreading the cost of their failures, failure is almost certain." P.13. Mallaby is clearly not a proponent of "privatizing the gains and socializing the losses."What about our affection with history that drive financial and other forms of socio-economic modeling. Mallaby has some succinct insights:"Projections are based on historical prices, and history could be a false friend." P. 233."In 1997, Merton and Scholes (LTCM) received the news that they had won the Nobel Prize for economics. The award was greeted as a vindication of the new finance: The inventors of the option-pricing model were being thanked for laying down a cornerstone of modern markets. By creating a formula to price risk, the winners had allowed it to be sliced, bundled, and traded' l thousand ways the fear of financial losses, which for centuries had acted as a brake on human endeavor, had been tamed by an equation." P.231.So, where does Mallaby leaves us at the end of this magnum opus? His analysis leads him to conclude "The worst thing about the crisis is that it is likely to be repeated." P. 377. However, to suggest that the hedge fund industry was the primary culprit in either the creation or magnitude of the Great Recession would be erroneous. Again, between 2000 and 2009, 5,000 hedge funds are to have ceased operations - none of which required a taxpayer bailout. Mallaby also takes a rather benign approach to the plausibility/practicality of regulating this industry ("The record suggests that financial regulation is genuinely difficult, and success cannot always be expected." P. 379).Yet, at the conclusion of this work, one quote from Mallaby continues to resonate with me: "It is the nonintuitive signals that often prove the most lucrative." p.302. However, the term "lucrative" as is as applicable to assessing risk and thereby avoiding potential losses, as it is to capturing returns on investment.Like I said, an epic contribution to the historical evolution of the hedge fund industry. An uncanny, incredibly thorough, balanced treatment - written in a way that is appropriate for both industry insiders, and the lay-person. A perfect volume for graduate coursework in finance -- one that focuses on human beings, as well as the quantitative financial services products they develop and deploy in the global markets today.

Inverting Franklin Roosevelt "...investors should fear the lack of fear itself". This is just one insight Sebastian Mallaby gives us in `More Money Than God'. In fact, he gives a nuts and bolts feel for Hedge Funds, their history and the people - the masters of the universe - who operate them. It is a history of leverage, short selling and size characterized by major success and catastrophic failure.Strangely, it also gives the small investor an insight into the share market. Is the market efficient? Can the market be beaten? If the market is not `efficient', hedge funds (and the small investor) can be successful. But sadly for an ongoing hedge fund, success removes the imperfections that it was profitably exploiting. "Sooner or later, every great investor's edge is destined to unravel" and often "quant brainiacs follow their computers to a well-deserved doom" because "the rocket scientists had blown up their rockets".Success means a flood of money into the hedge fund. But "an analyst might identify a promising small company and figure that its value could double over three years, but if there were only $20 million worth of shares available to buy, it was hardly worth bothering with." Not so for the small investor, but then again the hedge funds seem to be able to short sell flexibly at will - a facility that should democratically be available to the small investor.Starting in the 1990's, hedge funds became large enough to move markets of all kinds. They could even overpower governments. This allowed the Tiger Fund in 1998 to approach "Russian friends...to buy the entire stock of nongold precious metals held by the central bank and finance ministry...take the palladium, the rhodium, and the silver. All of it." leaving the logistics problem of getting it into a Swiss bank with Tiger's name on it.For the small investor there is sound advice:- it is often dangerous to trade on statistical evidence unless it can be intuitively explained". "Visceral" is the word meaning deep inward feelings rather than just an intellectual focus.- "The whole point of leverage, the very definition of the term, is that investors feel ripples of the economy in a magnified way."- We all rationalize success. One position by the Chanos Fund only worked out because the April 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstration broke out. This earned the comment "The way Ah see it, is that it took a revolution of a bihl-lion people for your darn short to work out."- "Event driven" investing at Farallon Fund specialized in predicting events that cause existing prices to be wrong e.g. takeover announcements, demergers, avoiding bankruptcy, meeting banking covenants, major economic events, hybrid security maturity dates etc.- `Pattern investing' used by the Medallion fund looking for patterns in the market. This applies research on French/English translation where the computer finds the grammatical rules not the programmer (using the Canadian Hansard which is conveniently in both languages).- A Tiger Fund manager "should manage the portfolio aggressively, removing good companies to make way for better ones; should avoid risking more than 5 percent of capital on more than one bet; and should keep swinging through bad times until luck returned".- Remember that "...the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent".- "If one of these stocks fell ... it was probably being pushed by an institutional block trader that needed to raise cash...the price would soon revert, creating an opportunity to profit." In other words, why is the seller selling?- "the biggest danger for buyers of illiquid assets is that in a crisis these assets will collapse the hardest."- "...the larger an investment fund, the harder it was for a fund manager to generate returns" meaning the small investor has more opportunity.- And remember, "LTCM calculated that this loss should have occurred less than once in the lifetime of the universe. But it happened anyway." The market does not follow a normal distribution; often it is not random; but then is it often predictable?Mallaby grapples with the variety of thought behind the success of the hedge funds giving us a workmanlike insight. This attempt to describe how the hedge funds actually operate - as far as he is able (and he tells us when he cannot) - makes this a valuable book indeed.