High-flying Adventures in the Stock Market (Hardcover)

The essence of their edge is that they bought Internet IPOs and stocks much more aggressively than other, similar funds at a time when the Internet was a red-hot investment area. That's the "run with the bulls" part of the story. That's a reference by me to the concept that when the market is hot, you should get into the hottest part of the market (better known as momentum investing). If you take a more conservative approach, you don't make the big bucks. A major part of the year's big gains versus other funds comes in the last few minutes of the last trading day of 1998 as AOL surges following its addition to the S&P 500 Index. But how the team does it is very repetitive and boring, even though they go through a gut-wrenching drop as Russian bond failures collapse the stock market and Long Term Capital has to be rescued by the Fed. That's the "watching the paint dry" part of the story.

This is a very challenging book to review accurately. The book has many fine qualities. Its best feature is that Molly Baker is terrific for finding everyday analogies for explaining basic stock market concepts. The priciness of P/E ratios is compared to women's shoes at different price levels, for example. So, if you know nothing about stocks, this book is actually a better source of explanations through analogies than any other book about investing I have ever read. However, if you know about stocks, her analogies just waste time and bulk up the book.

The day-to-day activities of the investment managers are about as interesting as watching someone do their laundry. They pretty much do the same things, over . . . and over . . . and over.

Rather than a diary-type recitation of many days, this would have been much more interesting if grouped into subject matters. That would have missed the "excitement" of the gains and losses during the year, but I doubt if too many people really care how a bunch of rich investment managers handle the stress of whether they get their three million plus for the year. I never found myself rooting for or against them.

Unless you really want to know a lot about how mutual fund managers manage your money, you will probably not find this book very interesting. And naturally, your own managers probably do it differently.

My firm does interviews with such institutional money managers every day, and we find that these people have many interesting ideas and insights. Somehow, very few of those ideas and insights made it into this book. That's a missed opportunity, for which I graded the book down one star.

On the other hand, if you know nothing about the market, and want to find out how a group of winners did it one time, you will probably love this book. For you, it is a five star book!

This is a great book for those who want to learn how fund managers work, how they glean information not availible to the rest of us mere mortals and also how you should potentially be thinking about the market, i.e. in terms of value or growth.

Where Baker lets the reader down is in her description of Frey himself. He seems delibrately caricutured as a small town boy made good. The book describes a friend of his going to visit his home town and descbing the reception that Frey receives as being akin to that of a returning astronaut.

Where the book suceeds is that it effectively describes "the tools of the trade" (or most of them at least), and also describes the ket trends in the industry.

This is a good reference book for strategists, consultants and day traders alike.