Finished Another Book

Ah, finally got a library card for the local keeper of tomes. I feel so connected to this place...wonder if I could bear to leave if I got a good job offer...hmmm. On that, I finished another book that I bought about a month ago Running Money. I was a little disappointed, actually. It makes it sound like Kessler (Andy Kessler is the author, and had a great read with Wall Street Meat earlier this year) would give a great rendition of what a hedge fund does. Well, I'm in the biz so maybe I'm not the target reader, but a couple things irked me.

One is that the guy never shorted a stock, just didn't jive with his investment ideas. What? Hedge funds, almost by definition, short stocks of bad companies and go long/buy those of good ones. Buying a lot of pre-IPO (before an Initial Public Offering, or when it lists on a stock exchange) tech stocks in the last 1990s is NOT my idea of a hedge fund. It is, however, a P.E. (Private Equity) fund or a mutual fund. Not a hedge fund. To be true, he did set it up as an offering that only 'sophisticated' investors could get into (over 1 million USD net worth, high income, that sort of thing) but I was looking for more insight into risk management and such: all they did that was advanced was buy 'the box' (subscribe to Instinet and Island so they could buy stocks right from the market) and sell much of their holdings as things were starting to tank (rather than holding the losers) and before 9/11. Well, sorry, that's not my idea of giving something to a reader that he might not already know.

The waxing poetic about intellectual property was interesting...how the good ol' U.S. of A. uses its brains to make money to by BMWs so Germans can buy copies of Microsoft Office and give Gates 90% margins...that was interestins. As was applying it to trade deficits, but I believe if you're after a story of a 'modern' hedge fund this is not really the place to look.