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.

Sebastian Mallaby, a former correspondent for The Economist magazine, is clear on where he stands on the issue of hedge funds regulation. He is against it. With the possible exception of a few systemically significant funds, he thinks regulation would bring more harm than good, and that there are more pressing concerns for fixing the global financial system. Not that hedge funds are a sideshow. Mind you, they manage close to two trillion dollars, and their management style and compensation practices tend to define the zeitgeist on the trading floors of financial institutions. Hedge funds are cool: as Mallaby shows, they are definitely the place to be for smart people bent on making serious money, or for those with the ambition to rewrite the rules of financial theory.Hedge funds are defined by four characteristics: they stay under the radar screen of regulatory authorities; they charge a performance fee; they are partially isolated from general market swings; and they use leverage to take short and long positions on markets. Most importantly, in a financial system riddled with conflicts of interests and skewed incentives, hedge funds get their incentives right. As a result, according to Mallaby, they do not wage any systemic threat to the financial system, and they may even provide part of the solution to our post-crisis predicament.The first set of well-aligned incentives deals with the issue of ownership. Hedge fund managers mostly have their own money in their funds, so they are speculating with capital that is at least partly their own--a powerful incentive to avoid losses. By contrast, bank traders generally face fewer such restraints: they are simply risking other people's money.Partly as a consequence, the typical hedge fund is far more cautious in its use of leverage than the typical bank. The average hedge fund borrows only one or two times its investors' capital, and even those that are considered highly leveraged borrow less than ten times. Meanwhile, investment banks such as Goldman Sachs or Lehman Brothers were leveraged thirty to one before the crisis, and commercial banks like Citi were even higher by some measures. As Mallaby notes, hedge funds are paranoid outfits, constantly in fear that margin calls from brokers or redemptions from clients could put them out of business. They live and die by their investment returns, so they focus on them obsessively.The second set of incentives deals with how hedge funds operate. They are usually better managed than investment banks. Their management culture tends to encourage team spirit and collaborative work as much as individual performance. Alfred Winslow Jones, the originator of the first hedge fund and the "big daddy" of the whole industry, invented a set of management tools and compensation practices to get the most from his brokers and managers. These innovations quickly paid off: whereas investors usually waited for company filings to arrive in a bundle from the post office, Jones' employees were stationing at the SEC's offices to read the statements the moment they came out. At a time when trading was considered a dull, back-office task, not something that a brilliant analyst would get involved with, Michael Steinhardt, another pioneer of the industry, would sit on his own trading desk and initiate the trading of large blocks of stocks with the seniority to risk millions on his personal authority.Other funds introduced a more scholarly approach to management. At the Commodities Corporation, which combined econometric modeling and chart reading, anyone who blew half of his initial capital had to sell all his positions and take a month off. He was required to write a memo to the management explaining his miscalculations. At LTCM, John Meriwether recruited young PhDs and encourage them to stay in touch with cutting-edge research; they would visit finance faculties and go out on the academic conference circuit. At Renaissance Technologies, the holding company of the flagship fund Medallion, Jim Simons gathered a team of mathematicians, astronomers, code breakers and computer translation experts that were so well ahead of the curve that they gave up reading academic finance journals altogether. Their office spaces bore signs claiming that "the best research never gets published" and papers explaining "why most published research findings are wrong".Hedge funds have a powerful incentive to improve upon existing knowledge, and market practitioners have often been ahead of academic theorists. They poked holes in the efficient-market theory long before the hypothesis came into disrepute among researchers. As Mallaby notes, innovation is often ascribed to big theories fomented in universities and research parks. But the truth is that innovation frequently depends less on grand academic breakthroughs than on humble trial and error--on a willingness to go with what works, and never mind the theory that may underlie it. A.W. Jones, the founder of the industry, had anticipated the rules of portfolio selection before Harry Markowitz formalized them in 1952. By the time William Sharpe proposed a simple rule for calculating the correlation between each stock and the market index in 1963, Jones had been implementing his advice for more than a decade.The most important set of incentives is that hedge funds are not too big to fail, and therefore they do not cast systemic risk over the stability of the whole market. The great majority of hedge funds are too small to threaten the broader financial system. They are safe to fail, even if they are not fail-safe. There is no precedent that says that the government stands behind them. Even when LTCM collapsed in 1998, the Fed oversaw its burial but provided no taxpayer money to cover its losses. By contrast, the recent financial crisis has compounded the moral hazard at the heart of finance: Banks that have been rescued can be expected to be rescued all over again the next time they blow up; because of that expectation, they have weak incentives to avoid excessive risks, making blowup all too likely.According to Mallaby, some of the perverse incentives that banks face come from regulation. Rather than running their books in a way that rigorous analysis suggests will be safe, banks sometimes run their books in a way that the capital requirements deem to be safe, even when it isn't. By contrast, hedge funds are in the habit of making their own risk decisions, undistracted by regulations and the false security provided by credit ratings. As a result, the hedge fund sector as a whole survived the subprime crisis extraordinarily well. By and large, it avoided buying toxic mortgage securities and often made money by shorting them.As Mallaby shows, hedge funds are a diverse lot. Following the fall of Askin Capital Management in 1994, George Soros declared to a Congress hearing that "there is as little in common between my type of hedge funds and the hedge fund that was recently liquidated as between the hedgehog and the people who cut the hedges in the summer." Nowadays hedge funds operate in merger arbitrage, long/short equity investing, credit arbitrage, statistical arbitrage, subprime assets, and all the other segments of market investment. And yet hedge funds have been equally vilified, mostly by people, institutions, and countries that stand at the other end of their investment strategies. Conversely, as Mallaby notes, "the countries that like hedge funds the best are also the ones that host them." One may also conjecture that countries that use hedge funds for their sovereign wealth investments will also develop a liking for them, as did universities endowments and other institutional investors looking for higher returns.I read this book after a series of popular essays on financial markets and the recent subprime crisis. I have no direct knowledge of the hedge fund or banking sector, and no practical experience of portfolio management. The names and faces of the people presented in the picture portfolio were all unfamiliar to me, with the possible exception of George Soros. More Money Than God therefore provided a useful introduction to a set of financial institutions that often appear collectively in the news, but that are not commonly analyzed as distinct managing entities or put in a historical perspective. Sebastian Mallaby revisits key episodes of recent financial history, from the Black Monday market crash of October 19, 1987, to the breakup of the sterling peg in 1992, the attacks on the Thai baht during the Asian crisis of 1997, the LTCM collapse in 1998, and the less well-reported quant quake of August, 2007.As of the debate whether hedge funds should be regulated or not, although I tend to err on the side of regulation in general terms, I must confess that Mallaby presents cogent arguments, and I am convinced that his voice will have to be reckoned with in future discussions on the matter.