Diary of a Hedge Fund Manager: From the Top, to the Bottom, and Back Again

CHAPTER 6

FLYING WITH THE GIANTS

As it turned out, the secret to managing money was having money to manage. Now that I was running a piece of Herman’s Southport Millennium fund, I worked longer and harder than I ever have in my entire life. I got up earlier, too. I was always up by 5:30 A.M., but now I started to whittle my wake-up time down into the 4:45 A.M. vicinity, no later than 5 A.M. I traveled more, attended, impossibly, more conferences, more management meetings. I was a road warrior, a freakishly frequent flyer; seriously, I must have done 200 management meetings in 2002. (I would set a personal record two years later with 256 meetings in a 12-month period.) I engrossed myself in the markets (and not just my narrow sector) with an invigorated fervor. I read everything, papers, magazines, biographies, white papers, anything that told me about the world beyond my reach, challenged my assumptions, using plane trips to catch up on materials I collected like a pack rat in freebie canvas conference bags.

My hockey philosophy kicked in full force. I clung to the concept that only harder work could separate me from the rest of the pack.

Mostly, though, I didn’t want to be wrong. I absolutely hated losing.

My first year making my own trades, 2002, was nothing short of a taxing slog through hideous markets. It would be our third straight year of making money in a down tape. Upon ...