The Alpha Masters: Unlocking the Genius of the World's Top Hedge Funds

Afterword

Myron S. Scholes

1997 Nobel Laureate in Economics, Co-Author of the Black-Scholes Option Pricing Model

I read Maneet Ahuja’s book, The Alpha Masters, less interested in understanding the wonderful personalities in the book and more interested in culling out lessons on investing. For those, however, who want to become familiar with larger-than-life personalities, the Alpha Masters, Bill Ackman, Ray Dalio, Jim Chanos, Pierre Lagrange and Tim Wong, Marc Lasry and Sonia Gardner, Daniel Loeb, John Paulson, David Tepper, and Boaz Weinstein provide great material for the investor’s People magazine.

The stories are fun to read and provide insights into those who perform in such a competitive “dog-eat-dog” atmosphere. Moreover, the stories provide us with the managers’ versions of their trading successes and failures. I was impressed that they all learned from their experiences. One common lesson is that they were persistent in achieving their goals, realizing that both bad and good outcomes provide learning that would make them better future investors. Many willingly impart their learning to the next generation of investors, students at their own firms or in universities, and to Ms. Ahuja in this book.

What did I gleam about these investors? As personalities, they stressed that their own road to success involved a tremendous amount of learning how to invest in their trading strategies; that is, what skills they needed to acquire to embrace and understand uncertainty how to handle ...