It's rare for even the largest, most sophisticated institutional investors to spend significant time in conversation with hedge fund managers.
Investors and hedge fund managers do communicate, usually through small talk at cocktail receptions or during formal presentations by hedge fund executives. But it's very uncommon even for the chief investment officer of an institution to have a running dialogue with a hedge fund portfolio manager that ranges beyond the performance or mechanics of the investment strategy.
But as the hedge fund reporter at Pensions & Investments for the past seven years (an eternity in the fast-moving industry I cover), I've gotten to know some of the smartest, most interesting hedge fund managers on the planet. Readers get occasional glimpses of these long-running, progressive conversations in stories, but only after I've managed to convince one of these attention-averse managers to let me share with the world a tiny portion of his or her ideas.
That's why I was so fascinated by a strange little book that arrived in early June — unannounced — in a plain brown envelope.
“Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous Hedge Fund Manager” is a lightly edited transcript of the conversations between a nameless emerging markets portfolio manager dubbed “HFM” and Kevin Gessen, co-editor of n + 1, a twice-yearly literary print journal and website (nplusonemag.com).
Mr. Gessen is not a financial reporter and admitted his naivety in the book's introduction. But Mr. Gessen's lack of understanding of exactly what kind of person he was talking to likely encouraged HFM to expound much more fully and freely about whatever he was obsessed with at the time. That generally involved the root causes of the credit crisis, since the interviews took place between August 2007 and September 2009.
This is your chance to listen in on an intimate conversation with a hedge fund manager, an experience you probably won't be able to replicate in real life.
