More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite

More money than God? Wow, what a quote!!!

This book took me almost a month to finish up. Since I moved to Malacca and having spent a lot of time to settle down; my productivity levels in book reading was the worst throughout my entire life, LOL… These days, book reading is not my main activity. I was stuck with plenty of gardening stuff and jungle tracking. Well, I enjoyed it, in fact…The situation get worse with World Cup kicked off at the wrong time, LOL. The results so far suggested that this could be one of the most exciting tournament (Dead tiki-taka finally? LOL). As such, I guess I need to reorganize my time to sleep less, reduce the Tarik session and reduce nonsense talk session in order to get back to my optimum level of productivity at least, LOL.

Frankly, the time taken on this book was very much worth it. In the first glance, I thought this is a book about how to earn more money than hedge fund. End up; it was a details chronology of hedge fund stories from day one it worked until the famous subprime crisis.  Well, I guess many are familiar with this sort of stories. However, to have a book that recorded full details on the ups and downs of hedge fund journeys is amazing. Furthermore, the author views the whole thing subjectively even though he is obviously against the whole hedge fund industries (I guess so). This is by far the clearest discussions that I ever read based on incredible research and interviews. At the end of reading, readers might find that they had indirectly travelled along with those legends in the book. Thumbs up for the author in providing such an excellent write up.

Seriously, I like this book so much that I am going to rate it at 10/10. This book is an essential book and a “must” read for traders and anyone who are keen to explore further in the field of investments. Last but not least, listed below are some of the excellent quotes exerted from the book. Some food for thought today…

Market forecasters could not sustain their performance. The very act of forecasting a trend was likely to destroy it… forecasters would speed up the workings of the market while working themselves out of a job.

Kovner once argues that the most profitable opportunities arise when you have no fundamental information.

Soros saw no point in knowing everything about a few stocks in the hope of anticipating small moves; the game was to know a little about a lot of things, so that you could spot the places where the big wave might be coming.

The larger the fund grew, the harder it became to jump in and out of markets without disrupting prices and damaging themselves in the process.

The equity investors came from a culture dominated by fundamental analysis. The commodity traders came from a culture dominated by charts and trend following.

There is no skill in coin flipping – and investment is no different.

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 unavoidable brittle.

Even though LTCM shrouded itself in secrecy, routing its trades through multiple brokers so that none of them could understand its bets, an army of imitators had pieced together much of its strategy.

“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent,” Keynes famously declared. Being early and right is the same as being wrong, as investors have repeatedly discovered.

Widespread knowledge of the hedge fund’s holdings contributed to their troubles. Commentators who insist that hedge-fund transparency would stabilize markets might usefully ponder this lesson.