Some good comments!
Hedge Fund Book
- Thread starter TimothySykes
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Some good comments!
More great comments:
lol I agree, he is by far the best....as fun as it was kicking Tudor_Jones ass...he was just a fool.....and subsequently got boring...but Paraclese is a different animal altogether!
lol Seben is his lawyer (like Fear and Loathing
)If you talk to Paraclese before I do, can you ask him to pick me up one of those Pzone's if he's getting pizza? I'm sure he wouldn't mind swinging by since it's pretty much on the way.
Book Review
An American Hedge Fund by Timothy Sykes, BullShip Press, Hamden, Conn., forthcoming Oct. 1, 2007, 267 pp., $19.95 (paper).
It happens often enough. A smart kid discovers stock trading after getting his hands on some moneyâfrom his bar mitzvah and the family jewelry business, in Timothy Sykes' case. He makes money trading; he's hooked. He trades day and night and makes more money. Attending school is deadly dull by comparison. The obvious next step is to start a hedge fund.
Mr. Sykes, something of an expert on micro-cap stocks and a millionaire before his 22nd birthday, started Cilantro Fund Partners LP in 2003 during his senior year at college. This occasionally entertaining but badly flawed book is the story of his rise and fall as money manager.
Highlights include his appearances on CNBC and other media, his being named a top trader by a magazine and his adventures as a connoisseur of food and modelsâthe lissome kind. Now he's also become a publisher by setting up BullShip Press to publish his own book. The name of the press evidently reflects what he thinks of most titles in the hedge fund genre.
He's a very enterprising 20-something, but clearly a young 20-something in the way he sees things. He hated Tufts University from the start, he explains, because it was cold, "[t]he girls were overwhelmingly unattractive" and he had to work hard to get good grades. So he transferred elsewhere and eventually received his degree.
But the bulk of the book is about his trades, successful and otherwise. This litany of ticker symbols quickly gets wearisome for a reader who is not a day trader in micro-cap stocks. The personal insights Mr. Sykes offers, like "My ego drove me, but I also shared my thoughts because I was pleased that everyone made money right alongside me," don't help much.
Around 1,000 hedge funds are launched each year and nearly the same number of funds fail every year. It is easy to start one but extremely difficult for a fund to survive over the long haul. The saving grace of this book is that it gives a sense of a young person trying to get into the business, but it is riddled with clichés and undeveloped notions picked up from others.
Unfortunately Mr. Sykes attempts to bolster his tale with a rant about a well-known policy issue. He blames the failure of his fund on the U.S. regulatory regimen that forbids hedge funds to solicit investments. Even the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission has acknowledged that the gag rule is not useful. But regulatory barriers are not Mr. Sykes' real problem.
He suggests the publicity he generated, for instance by starring in a reality show, would have helped him raise capital if he had been free to tell people about his fund. But the effect of any SEC restriction is beside the point because he lost big time in 2006, and his clients left because of the steep loss.
It is just as well that Cilantro Fund remained tiny. Mr. Sykes' one notable big trade was a disaster that proved he lacked a viable investment strategy. He bought illiquid shares in a software startup, became enamored of the company and invested more in it. The future looked great. "I truly believed this one investment would propel me to the next level in 2006," he wrote.
"The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Random House, April 2007), an entirely different sort of book from a very different sort of trader, helps one understand such common mistakes. "The Black Swan" has rapidly become required reading in the financial industry, just in time for the mortgage shock Previous HedgeWorld Story.
Mr. Sykes lost about 26% on assets of $1.2 million and is still holding a good chunk of the software startup that brought him down, the stock being too illiquid to unload. He had in effect transformed himself from a day trader into a venture capitalist, recognizing only after the event that his experience is in trading, not venture capital. Can you say style drift?
The book comes with a table of the fund's audited returns and is described as "a novel" in the publicity material, presumably to get around the solicitation ban.
The raucous media hype around Mr. Sykes shows how very desperate the media are to trot out anyone who can be called a hedge fund manager. No established money manager has put on a flamboyant TV show the way Mr. Sykes has. His real skill might be celebrity showmanship rather than money management.
Now some kids want his help to start their own hedge funds, probably attracted by visions of dating models. Investors should really make sure to give money only to fund managers who are adults in the full sense of the word.
CKurdas@HedgeWorld.com
An American Hedge Fund by Timothy Sykes, BullShip Press, Hamden, Conn., forthcoming Oct. 1, 2007, 267 pp., $19.95 (paper).
It happens often enough. A smart kid discovers stock trading after getting his hands on some moneyâfrom his bar mitzvah and the family jewelry business, in Timothy Sykes' case. He makes money trading; he's hooked. He trades day and night and makes more money. Attending school is deadly dull by comparison. The obvious next step is to start a hedge fund.
Mr. Sykes, something of an expert on micro-cap stocks and a millionaire before his 22nd birthday, started Cilantro Fund Partners LP in 2003 during his senior year at college. This occasionally entertaining but badly flawed book is the story of his rise and fall as money manager.
Highlights include his appearances on CNBC and other media, his being named a top trader by a magazine and his adventures as a connoisseur of food and modelsâthe lissome kind. Now he's also become a publisher by setting up BullShip Press to publish his own book. The name of the press evidently reflects what he thinks of most titles in the hedge fund genre.
He's a very enterprising 20-something, but clearly a young 20-something in the way he sees things. He hated Tufts University from the start, he explains, because it was cold, "[t]he girls were overwhelmingly unattractive" and he had to work hard to get good grades. So he transferred elsewhere and eventually received his degree.
But the bulk of the book is about his trades, successful and otherwise. This litany of ticker symbols quickly gets wearisome for a reader who is not a day trader in micro-cap stocks. The personal insights Mr. Sykes offers, like "My ego drove me, but I also shared my thoughts because I was pleased that everyone made money right alongside me," don't help much.
Around 1,000 hedge funds are launched each year and nearly the same number of funds fail every year. It is easy to start one but extremely difficult for a fund to survive over the long haul. The saving grace of this book is that it gives a sense of a young person trying to get into the business, but it is riddled with clichés and undeveloped notions picked up from others.
Unfortunately Mr. Sykes attempts to bolster his tale with a rant about a well-known policy issue. He blames the failure of his fund on the U.S. regulatory regimen that forbids hedge funds to solicit investments. Even the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission has acknowledged that the gag rule is not useful. But regulatory barriers are not Mr. Sykes' real problem.
He suggests the publicity he generated, for instance by starring in a reality show, would have helped him raise capital if he had been free to tell people about his fund. But the effect of any SEC restriction is beside the point because he lost big time in 2006, and his clients left because of the steep loss.
It is just as well that Cilantro Fund remained tiny. Mr. Sykes' one notable big trade was a disaster that proved he lacked a viable investment strategy. He bought illiquid shares in a software startup, became enamored of the company and invested more in it. The future looked great. "I truly believed this one investment would propel me to the next level in 2006," he wrote.
"The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Random House, April 2007), an entirely different sort of book from a very different sort of trader, helps one understand such common mistakes. "The Black Swan" has rapidly become required reading in the financial industry, just in time for the mortgage shock Previous HedgeWorld Story.
Mr. Sykes lost about 26% on assets of $1.2 million and is still holding a good chunk of the software startup that brought him down, the stock being too illiquid to unload. He had in effect transformed himself from a day trader into a venture capitalist, recognizing only after the event that his experience is in trading, not venture capital. Can you say style drift?
The book comes with a table of the fund's audited returns and is described as "a novel" in the publicity material, presumably to get around the solicitation ban.
The raucous media hype around Mr. Sykes shows how very desperate the media are to trot out anyone who can be called a hedge fund manager. No established money manager has put on a flamboyant TV show the way Mr. Sykes has. His real skill might be celebrity showmanship rather than money management.
Now some kids want his help to start their own hedge funds, probably attracted by visions of dating models. Investors should really make sure to give money only to fund managers who are adults in the full sense of the word.
CKurdas@HedgeWorld.com
Timmay Fund Audited Performance (3/2003 - 6/2007):
Compounded Annual Return: 1.52% (underperformed money market rates, with much higher risk)
Timmay Fund Sharpe Ratio (Annualized): -0.06
(may as well do a coin flip, or give up and go on TV/self-publish etc)
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Quote from TimothySykes:
.... You guys just don't understand that the numbers don't tell the whole story----words do---
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..he he he... It's an IQ test: 1)trust audited performance, or 2)trust "timmays words"
.... hmmm....
Compounded Annual Return: 1.52% (underperformed money market rates, with much higher risk)
Timmay Fund Sharpe Ratio (Annualized): -0.06
(may as well do a coin flip, or give up and go on TV/self-publish etc)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Quote from TimothySykes:
.... You guys just don't understand that the numbers don't tell the whole story----words do---
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
..he he he... It's an IQ test: 1)trust audited performance, or 2)trust "timmays words"
.... hmmm....
You gotta give it up, you're embarrassing yourself. Even with my subpar numbers, I'm still waaaaay ahead of most short bias funds. If you wanted to be objective, you'd post their numbers; only then would you be able to pass judgment on me. C'mon do it.
Tim, you are only fooling yourself!
Smart investors would only compare your poor returns with what they could get with safe investments like money market.
Tim, serious/accredited investors would never go near you.
I know your reply: "you do not know my plans"
OK, but we can only assume you know that your Fund will slowly die away...
Hahaha, it's nice to know you care. But don't feel too bad, my life isn't that bad and it's about to get a whole lot more interesting!
Actually my reply is that you don't know who I'm talking to. Serious/ accredited investors are loving me right now and I have some big backers for the future...