Book Review: Damsel in Distressed

Damsel in Distressed: My Life in the Golden Age of Hedge Funds. 2021. Dominique Mielle. Post 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 traders. Not solely had been the alternatives thrilling for her; they contrasted dramatically along with her earlier, grueling every day experiences as an funding banker, which impressed her to attend enterprise faculty at Stanford in hopes of transferring on to raised 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 progress 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 research throughout industries and thru a number of bankruptcies that can delight analysts — though lots of the firms are gone for good. She honed her monetary creativity by way of relentless evaluation of conditions, together with rigorous danger evaluation, and he or she clearly recognized conditions that had been uncorrelated with any market or rate of interest. Readers can be cheered to study that Canyon administration understood her hypotheses and acknowledged their potential for producing a worthwhile institutional product.

Mielle gives wonderful perspective on the hedge fund trade’s evolution. For one, she clearly addresses its emergence and its preliminary “identify” gamers within the early Nineteen Nineties. Her explanations allow the reader to grasp how these funds multiplied so quickly (by way of 2008). Hedge funds thrived on market and data inefficiencies. A few of us keep in mind the pre-EDGAR occasions that led to 1996. Earlier than then, we needed to look forward to 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 Avenue Reform and Shopper Safety Act, which took impact in 2016. The latter laws affected collateralized mortgage obligation (CLO) buildings by remodeling 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. Known 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, but it surely was not capitalized with the agency’s personal cash.

The creator addresses one theme repeatedly: The glory days of hedge fund investing have handed. Why? Up till roughly 2008, small, scrappy, nimble hedge funds might file 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 traders to press for more-advantageous, performance-based charges. Confronted with narrower revenue margins, the hedge fund trade shifted to pursuit of asset progress relatively than return.

The guide incorporates many vivid pictures with no single web page of images. The primary one that can have many readers howling is the creator’s encounter with Invoice Sharpe. Mielle takes us again to highschool days we’d relatively overlook along 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 properly ready, by no means complaining, however subjected to quite a few massive and little humiliations.

Damsel in Distressed excels for a mess of causes. The guide gives an genuine, firsthand account and relates an extended, rising, uninterrupted profession at a single agency throughout the interval of quickest progress within the hedge fund trade. Its creator 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 girl in finance since Karen Firestone’s Even the Odds: Sensible Risk-Taking in Business, Investing, and Life in 2016.

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All posts are the opinion of the creator. As such, they shouldn’t be construed as funding recommendation, nor do the opinions expressed essentially replicate the views of CFA Institute or the creator’s employer.

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