
A Hedge Fund Tale of Reach and Grasp
...Or What's a Heaven For
Author: Barton Biggs
Narrator: Don Hagen
Unabridged: 11 hr 58 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Ascent Audio
Published: 01/31/2011
Categories: Nonfiction, Business & Economics, Investments
Synopsis
In A Hedge Fund Tale of Reach and Grasp, the former top-ranked global strategist for Morgan Stanley, and now a hedge fund manager, expertly weaves fact and fiction to describe how the mysterious world of hedge funds and the people who run them really works. It is the story of how the brilliant but toxic interaction of brains, intensity, raw ambition, hubris, and greed combined with the “perform or perish” creed to fuel the egregious excesses and, eventually, contribute to the bursting of the stock market and financial bubbles. Lifestyles, portfolios, and loves were recklessly leveraged creating stunning excesses, but when the world turned, it wasn’t just proud fortunes that were lost; relationships and souls were ravaged as well. There is a compelling, but tragic, love story here about two people who celebrated love as a solution to spiritual isolation. The novel is also an investment chronicle, a tragic saga of how all brilliant performance is transitory and how, unfortunately, there is no stock market strategy that works forever and that too much money can’t spoil.
The protagonist is Joe Hill, an authentic American hedge fund success story if there ever was one, who came from nowhere, reached for heaven, and momentarily grasped it. Joe Hill isn’t the typical Wall Street whiz kid sporting an Ivy League education. Born on the wrong side of the tracks in rural Virginia, Joe had to work for everything he wanted. And he wanted it all.
A masterful mix of fact and fiction, A Hedge Fund Tale of Reach and Grasp is the inside, rags-to- riches story of one man’s American dream that became the world’s financial nightmare.


