Hedge

I've had the privledge to meet Ron and have learned a great deal from he and his team. His experience in both investing and analysing managers placis him in the rearified world of those with true insight. Reading his book will bring some of this long earned knowledge to you. The work is understandable and approachable, like Ron himself. Get the book. It will help.

The book is a complete collection of articles on the most widely implemented, and often misunderstood hedged investment strategies. For those seeking a deeper understanding of hedge fund investing, as well as insight into the thinking of many of the industry's thought leaders, this is the book.

This is a grandfather who decides to tell his family their history. I happened to pick up the book having no intention of being interested in anyone's family history, especially this book of the Hedge's family history. It made me laugh and cry. As I read the chapters I thought of so many people who would enjoy reading this book. It is so ordinary it is very extraordinary. You will want to buy a box of these books and pass them out to friends and relatives this holiday season.

What a joy to read about this close-knit family. "Flowers for Cina" made me feel like I had walked right in to the middle of a Hedges' Family Get-together. It is obvious that the love and faith of this family's patriarch has reached down through the generations.

For anyone interested in doing research synthesis, meta-analysis, or even a literature review, this is a "must have" in your collection. Various researchers present quite helpful information to save time, sweat, and tears in the process

This book is the best overall work on meta-analysis and research synthesis that has appeared in the past decade.All of its chapters are clearly written, and the data sets that are provided to illustrate the various techniques are extremely helpful. A lot of work went into the development of this book, and it shows.

I love this book and the author! She is a true "hedge witch" and has an incredible depth of knowledge. She also has real knack for putting that knowledge down in a very accessible way.
This book is sort of a re-vamped version of her now out of print (and very difficult to find) volume entitled, "Hedge Witch". This second book is more stripped down, more basic, which suits me just fine. Hedge magick is simple magick (which I believe is actually a title of one of the chapters in this book!). One of my favorite chapters is entitled, "Just Who Is It We're Praying To, Anyway?". That is Rae Beth in a nutshell. She gets right to the heart of a matter and is able to present it perfectly & honestly.

If you are interested in hedge witchcraft, you can't do much better than this book!

I haven't read this yet but I've had it in my Wish List for a while and just discovered that The Hedge Witch's Way is publushed in the US as The Wiccan Way and The first book, Hedge Witch is under the title The Wiccan Path in the US. Dunno why the name changes but they are both still available (used) under the US titles, in case someone else is lookin' for 'em.

I thought that this book was one of a kind! I loved it I used it for a report on Ellen Barker for a Human Relations class and it was exackly what i was looking for!

This book challenges so many of the assumptions of white males who continue to attempt to keep Women from showing their work. So much courageous work is being done by Women that it simply can not be kept quiet!!!! As a white woman, I was especially pleased to see that Women of Color were included in the discussions in this book.

'Pierrot mon ami' was written around the same time as Celine's 'Guignol's Band', and, like that controversial classic, features a passive innocent on the margins of society, with carnies, circus acts, petty ex-criminals, mad artists - at one point, like Ferdinand, Pierrot becomes an assistant to a fake fakir.

'Pierrot' has slightly more reference to the Occupation than Queneau's other novels in the period - a fire razing a giant amusement arcade is said to have been started by one of the attractions, burning chairoplanes; an uproarious journey with a boar and a chimp is arguably a figure for anti-Semitism; a bottle of Vichy water is pronounced disgusting.

Another point of reference might be Sartre's famous short story 'The Wall'. Pierrot's imprisonment may be more metaphorical than actual - he is condemned to walk the same streets every day; on the one occasion he leaves, the rest of the book's cast go with him, while the strangers he meet used to work in the area - but it provokes the same Nietzchean laughter.

I point this out to show how much 'Pierrot' is of its time - Queneau is often dismissed for refusing to 'engage'. In any case, 'Pierrot' is a supremely anti-Nazi book, with its shifting perspectives, its formal games, its narrative and semantic gaps, its instability of character, refusing the reader the reassurance of fixity or authority.

But if 'Pierrot' is of its time, it's also ahead of it. Together with Nabokov's 'The Real life of Sebastian Knight' and Borges' Ficciones, Queneau was at this moment pioneering anti-detective fiction, that genre later populated by Pynchon, Calvino, Eco, Sciascia et al, where the conventional rules of the detective story are invoked (a mystery, investigation), but its ideological function is displaced (resolution, restoration of social order).

'Pierrot' is full of mysteries - who was the woman Jojo Mouilliminche died for? Who was the Paldovian prince whose tomb Mouzzenergues faithfully curates? Who burned the Uni-Park where philosophers pay and brawl to see brief glimpses of female flesh, the hero is sporadically employed, and where he meets the boss's daughter who will sleep with everyone but him (well, he is a pierrot)? Are these things connected? There is a proliferation of clues, coincidences and patterns, but, perhaps because of the Occupation, there is less faith in the restorative powers of the genre.

Instead of fixing things in their proper place, 'Pierrot' is a book that celebrates play - every character is in some way connected to performance, and their every appearance is like a 'bit' or 'act' on the novel's stage.

Pierrot turns away from CHOICE to follow coincidence, chance meetings, crossed paths, to follow, dream-like, the destiny that will take him accross France with a tame monkey and a wild boar... A book dedicated to the peace of accepting the direction life sets us, instead of stiding, giant steps, to determine a false life for ourselves.

Bought this book in anticipation of fresh ideas. For the beginner this is a great way to get the mind flowing with new thoughts.

Personally I didn't find that it sparked anything new for me. But what doesn't work for some may work for others. If your a seasoned trader I wouldn't get it, but if you are a beginner I would order it right now.

James Altucher is a professional money manager and a contributor to TheStreet.com who has assembled a collection of "20 successful uncorrelated strategies and techniques" for trading the markets. His first book effort is one of the most practical trading guides I have encountered.

What sets "Trade Like a Hedge Fund" apart is that we don't have to take the author's word that these strategies are successful. Included in every chapter are the specific rules for each strategy and the tested trading results over the recent past. I particularly like the fact that he has tested the results across broad market indices and individual equities. For example, Altucher creates his own version of the famous "Turtle" trend- following system and tests it on the S&P 500 Index, the NASDAQ 100 stocks, and a basket of uncorrelated stocks. This very much helps display the robustness of the underlying trading concept.

Among the specific strategies disclosed and tested are a unique method for trading the spread between S&P and NASDAQ stocks; an intraday method for trading the Cumulative NYSE TICK; a short-term trading system that makes use of Bollinger Bands; a technique for allocating money to bonds; and a straightforward method for arbitraging preferred and common stock of companies.

Where I think this book is strongest is in illustrating how a professional hedge fund manager thinks about the markets. Many of the strategies are designed to take advantage of extremes in the market, where inefficiencies are most likely to be present due to traders' panic and overconfidence. Altucher's creativity in searching for these inefficiencies stimulates the reader to engage in a similar search. Reading the chapter on the NYSE TICK, for example, I soon developed my own promising variation on the author's strategy.

Are there weaknesses in the book? I found the text to be clearly written and well-illustrated with charts and tables. The systems were designed and tested with the Wealth Lab program, but the specific code for each of the systems is not included in the text. An exception is the pairs trading system, which is one of the most creative strategies in the book. The strategies are geared more for swing and intermediate-term trading than "day-trading", with the TICK system a notable exception. My sense is that creative researchers could adapt some of Altucher's ideas to shorter-term trading--particularly the pairs trading technique and the strategy for buying market "crashes".

Altogether, "Trade Like a Hedge Fund" belongs to a genre of books inspired by the work of Victor Niederhoffer (who Altucher acknowledges in his introduction). The focus is on scientifically-tested trading concepts, not discretionary, subjective ones. Where Altucher may differ from Niederhoffer is in his willingness to adapt traditional technical analysis tools (such as Bollinger Bands and gaps) to quant trading. As a matter of disclosure, let me say that I have corresponded with Altucher about his ideas, but this review was not solicited by him or his editor (who happens to be my editor as well). The best thing I can say about the text is that it has given me ideas for my own research and trading. I can't say that about many trading books.

Brett Steenbarger
www.brettsteenbarger.com

When I was on the board of a not-for-profit organization, I asked one of the major contributors for what amounted to a 25-fold increase in funding. He politely declined, telling me, "Stick to the meat and potatoes issues."

Well, "meat and potatoes" is what you get with Altucher's book. It's chock-full of techniques and mechanisms successful pro's use to earn ongoing, market-beating profits for their clients. From Page One, it's clear this is a no-nonsense read. Altucher doesn't waste the reader's time spewing self-aggrandizing war-stories, nor does he find himself mired in personal biases or widely-held market fantasies. Rather, he gets right down to the business of trading, taking a realistic, "whatever works" approach, including methods based in both counting (statistical analysis) and what is popularly referred to as "technical analysis." There is discussion of trading gaps, spreads and "the tick," moving averages and bands, and other lesser-known techniques including buying bankruptcies, taking advantage of option expiration day, and deletions from indexes. Each is clearly explained, using real-world examples, and all are augmented with very well done charts, graphs and data tables. Throughout, Altucher debunks a number of market myths and he kindly includes a short chapter on "what doesn't work."

Mind you, this book is more for seasoned investors than it is for rookies, though aspiring novices need not be discouraged from buying it and studying the techniques. It's about "trading," which is significantly different from longer-term, buy-and-hold "investing," and not to be confused with risky "day-trading." To make best use of the material, one should have a reasonable market vocabulary and it wouldn't hurt to have a few math skills, but if not, you'll still be able to make plenty of sense out of Altucher's plain speaking.

The principal criticism of "trading systems" is that once they're made known, they won't work anymore, or for very long thereafter. This is quite true. I've heard some say about Altucher's book, "Gee, how could he do this? Once the word's out, we won't be able to trade these again." Wrong. What Altucher offers is NOT a "no-brainer-get-rich-quick-doing-things-my-way" trading system designed to make the author rich by doing nothing more than selling books to the unsuspecting wannabe. If that's what you want, don't buy this book. What it is, and why you should buy this book, is a collection of proven professional techniques that, when applied thoughtfully and within reason, can over time help to make one a very successful trader.

That this book has been bundled with Niederhoffer's "Practical Speculation," and that Altucher mentions this and its predecessor "Education of a Speculator" first among all books in his reading list is telling. Niederhoffer has indeed written the Old and New Testaments of Market Speculation, and in "Trade Like a Hedge Fund," Altucher has written the Concordance. The bottom line? If you're a seasoned investor or an aspiring rookie, and you want to learn to be a successful trader, you can't afford not to own this book.

The author does a good job with the character's in the book. He really drew me in. I kept reading to see what was going to happen and then ... nothing did. The character's were great but the plot wasn't there. I was waiting for a climax, then all the sudden I was on the last page. Frustrating, because it could've been really good.

Avoiding any chance of the infamous "sophomore slump" after "What's Eating Gilbert Grape," Peter Hedges has created quite a fantastic book with "An Ocean in Iowa." Liberally drawing on, as most good authors do, his own experiences as a child, Hedges has created a realistic slice of life. Through the youthful perception of Scotty Ocean, Hedges relates the struggle to stay young (7 to be exact) and to avoid the rigors of growing up. On the cusp of my last year in the same West Des Moines school district Hedges went through, I find his story especially applicable. He hits on the many injustices facing Scotty (and most kids) without preaching about them. He simply states them as events of the story. This restraint makes Hedges' novel all the more poignant because it emphasizes the sad fact that Scotty Ocean has no true voice. Dealing with a strict judge as a father and an alcoholic mother who is unsure of her own desires, Scotty struggles to simply remain seven years old and no one is there to listen. Hedges wields the various conflicts within "An Ocean in Iowa" with both poise and a tremendous sense of beauty. The writing is easily-understood, but never simple. Hedges' attention to pertinent details paints vivid pictures that draw a reader to the characters and events of the book, especially the title character. Though the novel is written in third person, it is the special kind of third person that is slanted by the perceptions of whichever character is being focused on. Most of the time this is Scotty. Demonstrating a great understanding of children, Hedges creates a piece marked by the innocence of youthful perspective. With simple care, he follows the Scotty's gradual transformation as the child strives to deal with the curveballs he's been thrown. Following the roller-coaster pattern of life, "An Ocean in Iowa" has happy moments to balance the sad ones. Hedges captures the joy of little things with a strong sense of style. Most impo! rtantly, Hedges brings to the forefront the irony that is life. Maybe it is simply being the product of the same town and high school as Hedges, but I find his writing humorous and insightful for its similarity to my own life. This novel is only kept from a perfect "10" rating by its abrupt ending that left me looking for more. However, this only continues the pattern of realism of the book as I hoped for something different for Scotty.

An Ocean in Iowa is Peter Hedge's second novel, and just like his first, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, he focuses on growing up in small town Iowa. Scotty Ocean is a seven-year-old in Des Moines, Iowa, and believes his year as being seven is going to be his best. However, soon after his birthday, Scotty's mom, an alcoholic and failed artist, leaves the house. Scotty remains at home with his strict father, who is a judge, and his two sisters. Scotty believes the real reason his mother left is because he didn't behave all the time, so he starts to do more work around the house in attempt to get her to come home. At school, however, he starts to act out in attempt to be popular. His popularity will die out after awhile, and this hits Scotty hard as well. Hedge's keeps the book sane with his humor and keen eye for detail. He focuses on the problems of a dysfunctional family through the eyes of a seven-year-old. There is a small battle for custody where the mother asks the kids to live with her in Iowa City for the summer. Then, the father buys a swimming pool because "they deserve it." It is a must read for anyone (old and young) in a dysfunctional family.
I really enjoyed reading this book. My parents are divorced and I am form Des Moines, so the themes hit home for me. From the school to what he did in his free time sounded like a mirror image of my childhood. When Scotty's eighth birthday rolled around, he was suddenly too old for things seven-year-olds did. There is humor, drama, and a spirit-lifting theme that every year can be the best if you truly believe.

"When Genius Failed" is the amazing story of Long Term Capital Fund, a huge hedge fund (over $5 billion in equity capital) managed by people who were suppose to be brilliant (two partners won the Nobel Prize in Economics, three were former Harvard professors and several had advanced degrees from MIT and Harvard), which recorded astonishing growth in its first four years ($1 invested in May 1994 was worth $4.11 in April 1998) and then suddenly crashed ($5 billion lost in five months) during a time when the stock market was booming (mid- to late-1998).

Using complex economic models, the fund's managers had precisely calculated the risk of the fund losing twenty percent of its value to be an event that would occur no more often than once every fifty years and the risk of the fund crashing completely to be so statistically remote as to be nonexistent. So confident were the partners that they not only invested their own personal fortunes (some of the partners had net worths in the hundreds of millions), but also leveraged the funds assets to over $100 billion (a leverage ratio of 30 to 1) and exposed it to risks of over $1 trillion (through derivative investments).

Investors were eager to participate and nearly all of the major investment banks (Merrill Lynch, Chase Manhattan, Bear Sterns, Bankers Trust, JP Morgan, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley Dean Whitter, and Salomon Smith Barney, to name just a few) had big stakes in it. So successful was LTCF that less than a year before its demise, it returned $2.7 billion in cash to investors, since it had simply run out of opportunities in which to invest.

The errors that brought LTCF down were in a sense quite basic. (1) It not only underestimated the human element of the markets, it ignored that factor altogether. People - and therefore markets - sometimes act irrationally, but the precise mathematical models LTCF was using to predict market behavior couldn't account for that. (2) It was both extremely leveraged and extremely illiquid, which in combination is a highly risky position (ask any real estate developer who's had to carry a project through slow times). And (3) while it foolishly thought it had diversified its investments, it really hadn't. Though it had numerous investments, which made it look diversified, they almost all mirrored each other. The same market condition that affected one investment necessarily affected nearly all of them.

LTCF's rise and fall is a fascinating story filled with great themes -money, greed, hubris, success, failure - topics that make for great literature. That its a true story makes it all the more incredible. As a former columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Roger Lowenstein is well qualified to tell the story and he does a commendable job. Readers unfamiliar with economics may occasionally need to re-read sections to understand some of the investment concepts, but this flaw is easy to overlook. WGF is an otherwise fast read and one that will appeal to a wide audience.

It's now six years after the story, and still a lot of people, probably most people, don't understand LTCM. If anything, the memory is fading. I bought a copy of 'Genius' for my business collection, because it is now a classic. Andrew Tobias' and 'Adam Smith's' tails of speculation in the '60s/70s saved me from the bubble, and for that reason, it's important to have a copy of this book and read it. Because, have no doubt, we will go through this whole thing again. In your lifetime, probably sooner than later.

Genius does fail, pretty regularly, especially in the investment arena. Index funds still out-perform most of the managed funds. And yet this week the managed funds were once again reporting net inflows. I see and hear lots of praise for Black-Scholes. Surf the he web and you'll find it loaded with training courses on how to use it. Never do they come with any examination of it's potential problems.

Our Caveat Emptor society comes with an obligation to be educated on this stuff. Read Genius Failed, read Random Walk, read Popular Delusions, read Liar's Poker, read The Money Game, read, read, read. Otherwise, well, Wall Street's an expensive place to get an education, and with the coming problems in Medicare, and Social Security, we're all going to be faced with managing our retirements. The uneducated will be as lambs led to slaughter.

An absorbing account of the Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) fiasco that almost scuttled Wall Street in the summer of '98.Mr.Lowenstein has done a superb job putting this book togather given that most of the managers at the ill-fated fund were reluctant to talk , for obvious reasons .In retrospect , the story of LTCM's rise and fall seems to have the inevitability of a Greek tragedy _____ greed,hubris,brilliance and riches blinding the protagonists to the fatal dangers lurking in the unborn future . To put things in perspective , had you invested 1 dollar with LTCM in '94 it would have grown to 4 by the spring of '98 .Those 4 dollars would have shrunk to 25 CENTS in a little less than three months later after the dust had settled !The underlying principle behind LTCM being to take advantage on the "discrepencies" between bond and equity spreads (looking for "inefficiencies" ) with the assumption that markets tend to overshoot in the short term but revert to the baseline in the longer term . A bevy of ex-Salomen arbitrageurs (headed by John Meriwether) and a couple of Nobel laureates were supposed to gain LTCM an edge over the market . To amplify their results (since fluctuation in bond spreads are relatively small) they used leverage to their gills ____with assets of 4 billion dollars they were leveraged to the tune of 120 billion !Their plans worked brilliantly till '98 when the Russian default set off a domino effect that shook the entire international financial system : the spreads on LTCM trades instead of narrowing actually WIDENED (flight to safety) .This coupled with LTCM's fatal reliance on leverage saw to it that the fund was decimated as its Wall Street competitors (especially Goldman Sachs) smelling blood actually shorted the trades LTCM was long !!! The rest as they say is history .The Fed realising that LTCM's implosion could virtually dynamite Wall Street stepped in and engineered a buyout of its assets by 6 major firms .This is a page-turner and Lowenstein should be commended for it.

Chris Hedges began his education in the classics and religion, but became attracted to journalism and eventually addicted to war itself. He has decades of experience closely following conflicts in El Salvador, the Balkans, Israel, Sudan, Iraq, etc. Unlike many of today's "embedded" reporters who ride along with mechanized American divisions and see little of war except for the explosions in the sky, Hedges was always in close contact with the belligerents and victims of the conflicts, and this book details many of the gruesome scenes he witnessed.

Hedges' book also describes the brutal, catastrophic, and often irreparable damage that war and organized violence causes to the societies in which it erupts, as well as the disturbing and obscured reasons people actually kill in the name of the nation. He is not delivering a message of non-violence and non-intervention but trying to warn everyone about the dangerous and destructive addiction of war. Even those unaffected by the war in Iraq suffer the long-term consequences of this war. The effects of the increasing acceptability of war and excessive American nationalism will be visited upon our society in untold ways. Hedges vividly describes the effect that these forces have on other societies in the hope that it will disabuse people of the idea that America is the historical exception and that war is clean and simple.

That said, Hedges' book is a good read, but it lacks the intellectual punch of many other books about war and militarism. Many of the paragraphs read like they should have been spoken by Hedges (I have seen him speak and have talked to him before), and Hedges lacks much of the analytical ability needed to combat the overwhelming pro-war nationalist blather that pervades our society and media outlets. Many times he digresses unnecessarily and often reverts to moral and philosophical cliches. Nevertheless, the book is still very good and extremely timely. Everyone should read it if only to hear the stories of an unparalleled war correspondent and a truly compassionate human being.

Chris Hedges, the author of the book is a former war correspondent for The New York Times. He's seen war up close in Latin America, the Balkans and the Middle East. He looks back at those years as a time of his own intoxication with the great myth of war's appeal. Indeed, it seems to give people a noble cause and a purpose for living. Years after a war the participants often look back and remember never feeling so much alive as during those dangerous times, when their lives were one long adrenalin rush.

Nationalism is one of the plagues used by ruffian leaders to fire up the populace into hate. There's a bonding and a glory. The result is also devastating. Lives are lost, culture is destroyed and people are murdered and tortured. Yet, there is a seduction in the drum roll to this perverse conclusion. Later, memory is often distorted as its the winners who write history. There are psychological reasons too, a connection between romance and death. And it all happens again and again.

I was caught up the 185 pages of this well written book. But yet, after each of the seven chapters, I had to put the book down and do something else. I needed to get away from concepts that he was laying bare to the reader. I needed to move out of the world of horror he created. It's a complex book on many levels, because in spite of the many examples of unspeakable horrors, it seduces the reader too. By the time I finished it I understood what he meant.

Although Mr. Hedges is not a pacifist, he has exposed the myths and lets us look clearly at what war is. His perspective is fresh and clear and certainly made me think. It saddened me too. It's a universal truth that I wish wasn't so. The words are easy to read but their effects have a lingering and troubling effect. Not a pleasant read. But highly recommended.

Especially in light of the state of the world today and likelihood that the Bush administration will continue policies of violence and destruction, a book that provides a realistic view of war and its toll on humanity is sorely needed. Cutting through the glorified mythology that surrounds war and crusades again "evil" this book left me with a deeper understanding of the whole idea of war and where it fits into the dark side of the human psyche. I highly recommend it.