. 2021. Dominique Mielle. Post Hill Press.
In , Dominique Mielle educates and enchants with an enchanting memoir of her life – not only as a disciplined and completed financial skilled, but in addition as an exceptional leader amongst hedge fund performers and innovators. None of this is clear originally of the book, as she describes her early years within the industry, stunning the reader with all of the opportunities that on the time bore little fruit for hedge fund investors. The possibilities weren’t just exciting for her; They were in stark contrast to her previous, stressful day-to-day experiences as an investment banker, which inspired her to attend business school at Stanford within the hope of higher prospects.
Mielle landed at Canyon Partners, LLC and thrived there for 20 years, tackling quite a lot of investing challenges – from the wild ride of late 1998 to 2001 to the worldwide financial crisis of 2007-2008 and beyond. Her profession parallels the rapid growth of hedge funds, but she adds a special factor: a keen ability to identify opportunities where nobody else seems to, which emerged after working as an analyst in lots of situations and industries.
Mielle tells vivid stories of cross-industry evaluation and multiple bankruptcies that may delight analysts – even when most of the firms are gone for good. She honed her financial creativity through continuous evaluation of situations, including rigorous risk assessment, and he or she clearly identified situations that weren’t correlated to any market or rate of interest. Readers can be pleased to learn that Canyon management understood their hypotheses and recognized their potential for producing a profitable institutional product.
Mielle provides excellent insight into the evolution of the hedge fund industry. On the one hand, it clearly addresses the origins and the initial “name players” within the early Nineteen Nineties. Their explanations allow the reader to grasp how these funds multiplied so quickly (by 2008). Hedge funds benefited from market and data inefficiencies. Some of us remember the time before EDGAR, which resulted in 1996. Previously, we had to attend for firms to distribute results or submissions by fax or mail, and a few operators invariably received these submissions before others.
Mielle explains the changes in compliance which have challenged industry players over time, from Regulation FD (Fair Disclosure) in 2000 to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, passed in 2016 power got here. The latter laws affected collateral loan obligation (CLO) structures by converting a low-fee, capital-light CLO business right into a low-fee, capital-intensive business. Mielle got around this problem by inventing a special equity fund that preserved the integrity and profitability of the CLO. It is known as a Capitalized Manager Vehicle (CMV) and retains the equity of the CLOs issued. The CMV retained among the risk, as required by Dodd-Frank, nevertheless it was not capitalized with the corporate’s own money.
The writer all the time brings up one theme: the glory days of hedge fund investing are over. Why? Until around 2008, small, frugal and versatile hedge funds were capable of experience outperformance and exceptional returns that significantly exceeded the indices. However, success led to a rise in the dimensions of the fund, which became the enemy of outperformance. Competition increased, allowing investors to push for cheaper, performance-based fees. Faced with narrower profit margins, the hedge fund industry shifted to the pursuit of asset growth relatively than returns.
The book accommodates many vivid images with no single page of images. The very first thing that may make many readers cheer is the writer’s encounter with Bill Sharpe. With her description of the “Touchy/Feely” Interpersonal Dynamics course at Stanford, Mielle takes us back to the varsity days we’d relatively forget. Your experience in Brest, France is a breeze. She traveled the world, took every meeting seriously, was meticulously well prepared, never complained, but was subjected to quite a few humiliations large and small.
stands out for quite a lot of reasons. The book offers an authentic, first-hand account of an extended, distinguished, uninterrupted profession at a single company through the hedge fund industry’s fastest growth period. The writer is a superb and open-minded participant who can also be one in every of the industry’s rare female leaders. She proves to be tough, cheerful and resilient each in her profession and beyond. I’m “saddened” to read it for less than one reason: it’s the primary comprehensive book I’ve read since Karen Firestone in 2016 written by a number one woman in finance.
If you enjoyed this post, remember to subscribe.
