Investing in Hedge Funds Revised

by Joseph G. Nicholas

Book Overview

Hedge funds are in the news and on the minds of sophisticated investors more than ever. Investors have questions about how the funds are structured, where the assets are allocated, and whether hedge funds can truly act as a hedge against market risk. The answers are all here in Investing in Hedge Funds.

Until recently, much of what makes hedge funds tick has been closely guarded--the intellectual property of Wall Street's investment elite...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1576601846
• ISBN13: 9781576601846
• Release Date: August 2005
• Publisher: Bloomberg Press
• Length: 338 Pages
• Weight: 1.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.8" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

A Good Read!

While this book is meant to serve as an introduction to the complex world of hedge funds, hedge fund managers and hedge fund investors (in short, the hedge fund dynamic), it is decidedly not of the For Dummies family that currently dominates the do-it-yourself investment section of the book store. This is a highly sophisticated look at what has become one of the most exciting sectors of the investment world. If you have some knowledge of finance and its terminology, and you want to know what a hedge fund is, what kinds of strategies most hedge fund managers use and whether or not you'd want to or be able to invest in hedge funds, we ... recommend this highly specific book to you. On the other hand, if you just want to gain some insights into the investment world, you'd be better off picking up the financial section of the newspaper. Hedge funds are serious and so is Joseph G. Nicholas' book. (... note: Despite the 1999 copyright date, the book makes no reference to Long-Term Capital Management, the hedge fund that collapsed in 1998, nearly bringing about a global financial crisis.)

UNDERSTAND THE HEDGE FUND STRATEGIES MANAGERS USE

Nicholas examines all the hedge fund strategies in detail and provides the investor with examples of all the strategies used by managers. Excellent for understanding the mechanics of each strategy. As a doctoral student in business administration doing a thesis on hedge funds, I highly recommend this book for all investors

A good book overall

In the recent flood of often useless books aimed at investors this book stands out as a little gift. It provides a clear and detailed introduction to hedge funds useful to investors and to anybody with an interest in understanding how hedge funds work. The book is math-free, but thinking is not optional. I like the summary of hedge fund strategies and the description of their returns and weights in the universe of hedge funds. Unfortunately, one has to hope that the chapter and the charts will be updated frequently for they will be soon obsolete. As this book definitely deserves to see more editions, I hope that the author will go through the trouble to include both more examples and more details for each of the eleven strategies. That would definitely make the book more appealing to those readers with sophisticated backgrounds and useful to be used in classrooms as well.

Any personal library is lacking without this book.

Hedge Funds by Joe Nicholas offers a clear view of the complex world of hedge funds. He explains the individual strategies of fund managers and illustrates each on with an intelligible example. Nicholas then takes you through the steps necessary to incorporate this infromation into your personal investment strategies. This book has the clarity and educational value of a good textbook with all the readibility of a novel. No personal finance library is complete without Hedge Funds by Joe Nicholas.A reader from the University of Chicago

The first thorough treatment of the hedge fund industry.

Joe Nicholas' book, "Investing in Hedge Funds", fills an important void in the world of financial literature. Since the bailout of Long Term Capital Management in September, hedge funds have held a prominent place in the minds of the financial media. This attention has raised questions about what hedge funds are and what hedge fund managers do. The tendency has been to characterize all hedge funds as alike. Joe Nicholas' book directs readers away from this way of thinking about hedge funds, and towards thinking about how to differentiate them by their underlying investment approach. The bulk of the book is dedicated to 11 hedge fund strategies employed by hedge fund managers. Each of the strategy chapters provide examples of real trades made by hedge fund managers. Mr. Nicholas provides a vision of what has accounted for the rapid growth of the hedge fund industry, and an outlook for the future of that industry. He argues that the growth of the industry is being driven by the creation of, and access to, reliable information about what hedge fund managers do. This book seems to be an outgrowth of that vision.