Alternative-investments

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I used this book for my preparations towards CAIA Level 1 exam. And I am impressed. Mr. Anson is an authority and this is truely a great book for Alternative Investment aspirants.

If you want to have a very solid grasp of any of the following alternative investment approaches then this is the book you should turn to -

Hedge funds
Commodity and managed futures
Private equity (5 catagories)
....Venture Capital
....LBOs
....Mezzannine Financing
....Distressed Debt

....CrossOver/Interval/PIPE and PEPE funds
Credit derivatives
Corporate Governance

Mr. Anson helps you build strong fundamentals. Actually he clearly explains what constitutes Alternative Assets(Aha !!!) as against fundamental and/or capital assets and what is meant by alternative investment strategies.

This is followed by a rigorous analysis of the topics listed above in that order.

I particularly enjoyed his coverage of Hedge Funds. He explains each of the 10 Hedge Fund strategies in a systematic fashion. From a variety of angles including Market(S&P500), Risk, Regulatory, Due Diligence/Operational/Administrative perspective.

The coverage of Commodity Derivatives is also superb. Although confined to 4 chapters this coverage is sufficient to gain an intermediate level insight into the Commodities.

The coverage for Private Equity is less comprehensive(but good) compared to it's actual scope in real world. I particularly expected a more rigorous coverage for LBOs.

Although I did not touch credit derivatives and CorpGov I could tell you for sure that these topics must have been covered well.
As I read 19 out of 22 chapters.

To put it in a nutshell - This is a very good book for Hedge fund aspirants and prospective Alternative investment professionals.

For more info about CAIA please visit www.caia.org.

As a doctoral student, I strongly recommend this book to academics and practitioners wishing to understand the universe of alternative investments. Dr. Thomas Schneeweis is recognized as the world's leading authority in this field and provides us with the latest on hedge funds and managed futures. He has created the first comprehensive handbook on the fastest growing asset class in the industry and has done a superb job in the selection of the articles for this book. Learn how to reduce your portfolio risk with alternative investments. This is a must read for serious investors.

This academicically oriented monograph provides numerous real estate investment related papers. The papers are several years old but are still fairly relevant.

This book contains several very interesting research papers. It is definitely for the scholarly reader whom is interested in real estate investment..

The monograph contains numerous academic papers on real estate investment that I found most thought provoking.

This book makes a pursuasive case for creating, at nearly any age (assuming you have a net worth in excess of $2-3 milion), an irrevocable life insurance trust, and using the cash to fund a second to die life insurance policy. The proceeds will be used to pay estate taxes, giving you huge leverage over other alternative investments. All good concepts, proved with numerous and interesting examples. Unfortunately, the book is redundant, starts out a bit "hard sell", and has a defensive tone throughout. Mr. Kaye would be better served by writing in a less collequial way...more "professional" in tone. And, not frustrating his reader who eagerly turns each page to learn new concepts, only to find Mr. Kaye making the same point over and over again. It is almost as though Mr. Kaye doesn't think he will be believed...so he repeats the thesis again and again. It got tiring...

Estate taxes can claim up to 55% of your estate. Barry Kaye's simple yet amazing concepts showed me how to legally discount that amount by more than 90%. When I showed them to my accountant he didn't believe them at first ... but now we're both sold! Thank you Barry Kaye for helping preserve and protect my estate for my children and grandchildren.

This book shows and tells about a totally new approach to estate planning. It also intoduces life insurance as a commodity to be utilized as an additional diversification of assets for any portfolio. In this manner it shows how you can offset and discount your estate taxes while diversifying, optimizing and guaranteeing your assets.

The author introduces many new concepts in short three page chapters with completely understandable charts.

In the back of the book there are valuable tables that are most useful as well as the rates for the lowest priced policies at every age.

Excellent for anyone who never knew but wants to know or any professional looking for easily understandable information on this subject written by the leading practicioner on this subject.

I could sum this book up in eight words:
So you didn't like law school? Try teaching.
There I just saved you the time of ordering and reading it. This book was a typical one of those books you see in a public library with really basic common sense ideas and little insight.

I am a career counseler at a law school in Chicago, and I used Ms. Arron's book about a year ago to decide what career I should pursue when I left the practice of law. I bought other career-change books and found none of them to be as useful as this one. I knew I wanted to stop practicing law, but was completely lost as to what career I wanted to pursue next. I kept dragging my feet because I felt so unsure of what awaited me. As soon as I started reading Ms. Arron's book, I instantly felt that she understood exactly what I was going through. Doing the self-assessment exercises really brought me a lot of clarity, and helped me decide what career I wanted to pursue next. Her book also contains an abundance of valuable resources which I used to research my options. By the time I applied for my job as a career counselor, I felt 100% ready to leave the practice of law and very excited about embarking on my new career. I had a much better understanding of my strengths, weaknesses, and values than I ever had before. Without this book, however, I think I would still be unhappily practicing law (or worse yet, that I would have left the practice of a law for a job that suited me even less than being an attorney). I recommend this book to all the law school alums I counsel with respect to career change issues, and I have also recommended it to several laywer friends of mine who are struggling with the question of whether they should continue practicing law. Everyone I know who has read the book has enjoyed it as much as I have and found it to be just as useful. It is, without a doubt, the best career-change handbook for lawyers.

Some of the people who have given this book negative reviews are obviously not the target audience for the book. This is NOT for law students looking for a job or for certain types of lawyers. This is for lawyers who are dissatisfied in their careers and are looking at career transition.

For the target audience, this book in invaluable. Deborah Arron really understands the issues involved and helps navigate the reader through the problems with letting go of a bad situation, finding ideas for next steps and getting to a solution. There is no other book on the market that addresses these issues in the way this one does.

I can't understand why people who aren't the target audience feel the need to trash the book publicly.

Only focuses on one aspect: risk computations and leverage This book is certainly not a handbook on how to buy a hedge fund. It spends a great deal of time discussing how to disect a fund's returns mathematically. It does a good job of explaining in simple English what is wrong with using standard deviations of returns in trying to determine a fund's risk. Unfortunately, that is not all that one should consider in evaluating a fund. It does not go into detail about looking at other funds a manager may have been involved with, comparing that fund's returns to other funds in its class. It does not talk about understanding how hedge funds determine their fees, how to watch out for fraud, how to evaluate a fund's accountants and lawyers and the relative importance of these factors. It does not spend much time on discussing the risks involved due to the fact that most funds limit when one can put in or take out money or that a fund may force you to take some of your investment back. It also does not discuss tax treatment. Many funds' earnings are reportable as regular income. This may be important. The bottom line is that you can find out about risk and volatility from a stat book. It is the other behind the scenes unformation that is also critical in choosing a hedge fund.

I am highly skeptical of the data behind most of this book. The figures seem consistently wrong. I doubt a single set of data could give the #s shown in both Table 4.2 & Chart 4.5. I find it funny that in Charts 7.1 & 7.2, 2 managers have tremendously different gross returns, but seemingly the exact same set of monthly returns. Funny again, in Charts 8.1 & 8.2, "Best" & "Random" managers seem to have the exact same results. Are the errors in proof-reading, concept, or facts?

I read this book in about an hour, it is vey simplistic in the analisis and its conclusion or based on assumptions that can never be applied to hedge funds, specialy his survivorship analysis. I have read about 10 books in hedge funds, I find this the least helpful.

as a reasonably sophisticated individual investor, i was hoping for some additional insights over what i already know re: convertibles, metals, hedge funds, etc. --the successes and failures of this book are largely section specific: for example, the chapters on Energy, Distressed Securities and Hedge Funds were insightful and worthwhile, whereas the chapters on Gold and Microcaps were hardly worth reading (i.e. no insights whatsoever). In general, Tremont Advisors did a great job in their sections, and the rest (except the one on Energy) were woefully inadequate.

It seems this book was written with a target audience of unsophisticated / non-critical high-net worth individuals in mind...how many of them are out there, hmmm?

Proceed with caution.