Jacket Description/Back:

Praise for HedgeHogging

"Barton Biggs writes about markets with greater style, clarity, and insight than any other observer of the Wall Street scene. His new book, Hedgehogging, entertains immensely even as it provides countless valuable lessons regarding hedge funds and the investment world they inhabit."
- David F. Swensen, Chief Investment Officer, Yale University

"Since the glory days of the tech bubble, investing has become a perilous enterprise. Not the least for those running money in the proliferating hedge fund business. In Hedgehogging, Biggs offers a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes at the personalities and egos making decisions about the enormous sums being dumped en masse into these funds. This book is great. It's full of personal anecdotes and critical insights from an insider's insider. You should not even consider giving money to anyone on Wall Street ever again until you've read this book."
- Addison Wiggin, Agora Financial LLC, author of the New York Times bestseller, The Demise of the Dollar and coauthor of Empire of Debt

Rare is the opportunity to chat with a legendary figure and hear the unvarnished truth about what really goes on behind the scenes. Hedgehogging represents just such an opportunity, allowing you to step inside the world of Wall Street with Barton Biggs as he discusses investing in general, hedge funds in particular, and how he has learned to find and profit from the best moneymaking opportunities in an eat-what-you-kill, cutthroat investment world.

Jacket Description/Flap:
Hedgehogging is one of the most instructive, fascinating, and inherently entertaining investment books of this or any year. Written by legendary Wall Street investor and executive Barton Biggs, it provides an impressionistic view of ?professional investors as well as the agony and ecstasy that are endemic to this frenetic and highly competitive world.

The book tells of the successes and the failures of these men and women. It unveils the moral code that they live by, and describes their different life styles and operating patterns. It also relates the adventures and travails of these incredibly intense and obsessed investment personalities, their peculiarities, and the stresses they experience. Hedgehogs are strange, insecure, but fascinating characters, preying on each other and other investors in the battle for investment survival.

Biggs was an English and Creative Writing major at Yale who studied under Robert Penn Warren. His book is populated with a mixture of real identifiable people and real disguised people as well as with occasional fiction. There is no exaggeration. Everything except for one whimsical tale, which is completely fictional, actually happened. Stories of investment adventures and individual journeys, both triumphs and disasters, are related, but there are no answers, only retrospective wisdom.

The book is not an investment primer nor does it tell how to start a hedge fund, although it does recount some of Biggs's experiences in the formation of his fund. However, there are chapters that describe the way others? ranging from Count Otto von Bismarck to the Yale Endowment? have dealt with the battle for investment survival, and it provides a modelof how hedge funds might be employed in a modern portfolio. Inevitably some of Biggs's investment biases surface.

Hands-on experience is an unparalleled teacher, and Barton Biggs has seen and experienced the highs and lows of Wall Street as few others have. Now, Biggs has written about the professional investment world in general and hedgehogs in particular. As engaging, blunt, and intellectually provocative as its author, Hedgehogging pulls back the curtain to provide a rare insider's look at what actually goes on, both in Wall Street's corner offices, at dinner meetings, and in the highly competitive, lucrative world of hedge fund management.