Money – Protect and Grow

Author Russel Kinnel walks readers through the handful of key factors they need to pick winning funds. Armed with the quantitative data and qualitative research, they will gain the confidence to pick great funds for the long-term. This book will be accompanied by a web-based tool created by Morningstar, which will enable readers to evaluate their own funds using Kinnel’s criteria.

Written in a fun and accessible manner, The Fund Spy offers Kinnel’s unique insight as a 14-year Morningstar fund analyst. He speaks plainly about the conflicts that can go against investors’ interests, explaining how to avoid traps and push out the slick sales pitches facing today’s investors. He also offers several “10 lists,” which provide quick answers to investors’ most common questions (e.g., the Top 10 Funds to Recommend to Relatives, the 10 Best Contrarian Managers, the 10 Most Overrated Managers).

If you’re serious about picking the right investments for your portfolio, Fund Spy will put you on the right track.

Nobody is more familiar with mutual funds than author Russel Kinnel, the Director of Mutual Fund Research for Morningstar, Inc. and Editor of Morningstar® FundInvestor, a monthly newsletter for individual investors. He has spent over 15 years researching mutual funds and meeting with the people who manage them. Now, with Fund Spy, he offers unparalleled guidance that will sharpen your investing skills and help you find the best funds for your portfolio.

Filled with in-depth insights and expert advice, Fund Spy arms you with the information needed to intelligently screen and select a variety of funds. While both effective new strategies and time-tested techniques are outlined throughout this reliable resource, all of the methods here will help you avoid common mistakes and outperform the average investor.

Page by page, Fund Spy puts this process in perspective with detailed discussion of:

• How to find managers who invest millions of their own money in their funds

• Why fund expenses really matter

• Using a fund’s performance to understand its risk and reward profile, as well as its behavior in different types of markets

• How to find great fund managers and teams

• And much more

Combining quantitative data with qualitative research, Kinnel highlights key factors that drive fund performance and writes candidly about the industry’s conflicts of interest that can harm investors.

Don’t settle for high-cost, poorly run funds simply because they fell into your portfolio or someone is touting them. Follow the guidance found in Fund Spy and you’ll quickly discover what it takes to research and buy the right funds. Three months from now, you may not see a difference, but you will see a dramatic difference in five or 10 years, when the power of compounding has substantially grown your portfolio and put more money in your pocket.

There s a buzzword that has quickly captured the imagination of product providers and investors alike: “hedge fund replication”. In the broadest sense, replicating hedge fund strategies means replicating their return sources and corresponding risk exposures. However, there still lacks a coherent picture on what hedge fund replication means in practice, what its premises are, how to distinguish di erent approaches, and where this can lead us to.

Serving as a handbook for replicating the returns of hedge funds at considerably lower cost, Alternative Beta Strategies and Hedge Fund Replication provides a unique focus on replication, explaining along the way the return sources of hedge funds, and their systematic risks, that make replication possible. It explains the background to the new discussion on hedge fund replication and how to derive the returns of many hedge fund strategies at much lower cost, it differentiates the various underlying approaches and explains how hedge fund replication can improve your own investment process into hedge funds.

Written by the well known Hedge Fund expert and author Lars Jaeger, the book is divided into three sections: Hedge Fund Background, Return Sources, and Replication Techniques. Section one provides a short course in what hedge funds actually are and how they operate, arming the reader with the background knowledge required for the rest of the book. Section two illuminates the sources from which hedge funds derive their returns and shows that the majority of hedge fund returns derive from systematic risk exposure rather than manager “Alpha”. Section three presents various approaches to replicating hedge fund returns by presenting the first and second generation of hedge fund replication products, points out the pitfalls and strengths of the various approaches and illustrates the mathematical concepts that underlie them.

With hedge fund replication going mainstream, this book provides clear guidance on the topic to maximise returns.

“It was around early 2002 when Lars Jaeger and I started exchanging ideas about distinguishing between hedge fund alphas and hedge fund betas as different sources of performance. Hitherto, most hedge fund return models were rooted in performance attribution literature. The notion of a rule-based approach to investing into a portfolio of hedge fund strategies, such as investable hedge fund indices, was not much more than a germ of an idea. Lars’ seven-year journey, from embracing the concept of alternative beta to persuading the investment community that this represents an efficient avenue for achieving hedge fund-like returns, is a tour de force. This book offers the reader valuable insight into the thinking behind this landmark development in hedge fund research.”

Bill Fung, Visiting Research Professor of Finance, Hedge Fund Research Centre, LondonBusinessSchool.

Clear and simple, an invaluable primer on health insurance. The Silver Lake editors aim to educate consumers on all types of insurance, and health insurance is surely among the most baffling. Furthermore, as the authors point out, a result of changing employer/employee relations has been a change in how people getor don’t gethealth insurance. Readers must be prepared to understand options and make informed choiceswith the help provided here, this is not an impossible task. The authors begin with basic mechanics and key definitions, then go on to cover the various categories of insurance, from traditional indemnity (or fee-for-service), through major medical, managed care (“known for its atrocities”), Medicaid/Medicare, workers’ compensation, and special coverage (for example, in case of cancer). They then explain in detail how to choose insurance for individual situations. As they realistically point out, when it comes to insurance, “problems don’t surface until you make a claim which is denied or underpaid”and for that inevitable occurrence, here is help sorting it all out. Most importantly, the authors advise, be ready to review health insurance coverage annually: no matter how onerous the task, it’s the only way to maintain adequate coverage in a fast-changing field. A timely lesson, then, on an important subject. — Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Hassle-Free Health Coverage is critically important reading for anyone facing an open enrollment period, changes jobs… — Wisconsin Bookwatch

What consumers need to know about health insurance–major medical, managed care, Medicare, Medicaid, and workers’ compensation. — Bottom Line Health