Hedge Funds: The Philosopher Kings

"FORBES

Steven Drobny's inside look at hedge funds couldn't come at a more appropriate time. Everyone should know what makes these private investment partnerships tick, where they are putting their gobs of money and how they see the markets going forward. Hedge funds, after all, are believed to account for up to half of all stock trading and are the controversial focus of a debate and legal fracas over their regulation.

Drobny's Inside The House of Money ($30, John Wiley & Sons, 2006) sheds more light than ever on the minds behind the largest global macro hedge funds, those giant pools of money that see the whole world as their oyster (unless they've gone short on shellfish). They make big bets on crude oil, Eurodollars, gold, Japanese bonds, Brazilian soybeans, sugar, cotton, you name it--investments that most ordinary investors would likely avoid.

Drobny humanizes his hedge fund operators, showing them as global thinkers out to exploit any opportunity in inefficient markets, but not as a force out to destroy the financial system. It is a welcome relief from the harping of a skeptical crowd of onlookers who seem to see the forces of darkness lurking behind every one of these partnerships.

The book reveals the intricacies of thinking like a hedge fund manager. Marko Dimitrijevic of Miami's Everest Capitalliked Argentinean banks, went short with Japanese government bonds when they were yielding only 0.45% (very clever, because interest rates were bound to rise and depress the bonds) and was also playing the markets in Cyprus, Mongolia and Uruguay. He also recommended YUM Brands (nyse: YUM - news - people ), owner of Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut, as the best American stock to play the growth in China.

There's some brilliant common sense here, valuable to us mere mortals. Dr. John Porter of Barclay's Capital believes that momentum trading is the flavor of the month and that "people who are indexed are going to get killed." Porter anticipated the knee-jerk response of the U.S. Federal Reserve to loosen money when tech stocks sold off in 2000. He loaded up on two-year Treasuries at 6.75%, which was a bet that interest rates were headed down and the value of the notes were headed up. It was a highly profitable play when the cost of money dropped to 1%.

Drobny also shows how managers have learned from past hedge fund failures. Peter Thiel of Clarium Capital in San Francisco refuses to become the next Long Term Capital Management. He places stop-loss orders on every trade-- a very tough discipline--but one that limits disastrous losses.

One shortcoming of the book is that since hedge fund operators are so nimble, they may well be long out of the positions they revealed to Drobny in 2005. That's the nature of hedge funds; they don't have investment committees and can dump a position in five minutes and get back in it the next day. What's compelling among these money managers is their intensity in educating themselves about nations and bottom-up individual investment opportunities."

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