Damsel in Distressed: My Life within the Golden Age of Hedge Funds. 2021. Dominique Mielle. Publish Hill Press.
In Damsel in Distressed, Dominique Mielle educates and enchants with a mesmerizing memoir of her life — not solely as a disciplined and consummate monetary skilled but additionally as an distinctive chief amongst hedge fund performers and innovators. None of that’s obvious because the guide begins, when she describes her early years within the trade and dazzles the reader with all of the alternatives that in these days represented low-hanging fruit for hedge fund buyers. Not solely have been the alternatives thrilling for her; they contrasted dramatically together with her earlier, grueling day by day experiences as an funding banker, which impressed her to attend enterprise college at Stanford in hopes of transferring on to higher prospects.
Mielle landed at Canyon Companions, LLC, and thrived there for 20 years, grappling with a plethora of investing challenges — from the wild experience of late 1998 to 2001 to the 2007–2008 international monetary disaster, and past. Her profession parallels the speedy development in hedge funds, however she provides a particular issue: a eager capability to establish alternative the place nobody else appears to, which emerged after she had served as an analyst in lots of conditions and industries.
Mielle tells vivid tales of study throughout industries and thru a number of bankruptcies that can delight analysts — despite the fact that lots of the firms are gone for good. She honed her monetary creativity by means of relentless evaluation of conditions, together with rigorous threat evaluation, and he or she clearly recognized conditions that have been uncorrelated with any market or rate of interest. Readers might be cheered to be taught that Canyon administration understood her hypotheses and acknowledged their potential for producing a worthwhile institutional product.
Mielle offers glorious perspective on the hedge fund trade’s evolution. For one, she clearly addresses its emergence and its preliminary “title” gamers within the early Nineteen Nineties. Her explanations allow the reader to know how these funds multiplied so quickly (by means of 2008). Hedge funds thrived on market and knowledge inefficiencies. A few of us bear in mind the pre-EDGAR occasions that resulted in 1996. Earlier than then, we needed to watch for firms to disseminate outcomes or filings through fax or snail mail, and a few operators invariably acquired these filings earlier than others.
Mielle lays out the modifications in compliance that challenged the trade gamers as time handed, from Regulation FD (honest disclosure) in 2000 to the 2010 Dodd–Frank Wall Road Reform and Client Safety Act, which took impact in 2016. The latter laws affected collateralized mortgage obligation (CLO) constructions by reworking a low-fee, capital-light CLO enterprise right into a low-fee, capital-intensive one. Mielle labored round this downside by inventing a special-purpose fairness fund that preserved the CLO’s integrity and profitability. Referred to as a capitalized supervisor car (CMV), it retained the fairness of the CLOs issued. The CMV retained a part of the chance, as required by Dodd–Frank, however it was not capitalized with the agency’s personal cash.
The writer addresses one theme repeatedly: The glory days of hedge fund investing have handed. Why? Up till roughly 2008, small, scrappy, nimble hedge funds might document outperformance and distinctive returns, materially exceeding the indices. Success, nonetheless, bred elevated fund dimension, which grew to become the enemy of outperformance. Competitors elevated, enabling buyers to press for more-advantageous, performance-based charges. Confronted with narrower revenue margins, the hedge fund trade shifted to pursuit of asset development quite than return.
The guide comprises many vivid pictures and not using a single web page of images. The primary one that can have many readers howling is the writer’s encounter with Invoice Sharpe. Mielle takes us again to highschool days we’d quite neglect together with her description of the “Sensitive/Feely” Interpersonal Dynamics course at Stanford. Her expertise in Brest, France, is a hoot. Around the globe she went, taking each assembly critically, being meticulously nicely ready, by no means complaining, however subjected to quite a few huge and little humiliations.
Damsel in Distressed excels for a mess of causes. The guide offers an genuine, firsthand account and relates an extended, rising, uninterrupted profession at a single agency throughout the interval of quickest development within the hedge fund trade. Its writer is an excellent and broad-minded participant who as well as is likely one of the trade’s uncommon feminine leaders. She additionally proves to be robust, good humored, and resilient, each in her profession and outdoors of it. I’m “distressed” to learn it for just one motive: It’s the first substantial guide I’ve learn authored by a number one lady in finance since Karen Firestone’s Even the Odds: Wise Threat-Taking in Enterprise, Investing, and Life in 2016.
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