This is a training manual for running the business side of a hedge fund: raising capital, passing due diligence, and looking institutional. It has almost nothing to do with picking trades or managing a portfolio, despite the title.
The one idea
Wilson's real subject is capital raising. He built his career as a third-party marketer and runs a hedge fund industry training program (the CHP Designation), and the book reads like an expanded version of that curriculum: interviews with 20-plus marketers, compliance consultants, and fund administrators, stitched together with his own commentary and chapter-ending quiz questions.
The throughline across every chapter is the same claim: performance alone does not raise money. What separates funds that grow from funds that stall is operational polish, whether they can produce a signed-off compliance report in 24 hours, whether their due diligence questionnaire (DDQ) is ready before an investor asks for it, whether their pitch deck has been through five internal drafts before an investor sees it. Trading strategy is treated as a given, something the reader already has, not something the book teaches.
The book leans hard on named blowups (Long-Term Capital Management, Bayou Hedge Fund Group, Bernie Madoff) as case studies in what due diligence should have caught: style drift, an unverifiable background, a manager who controls his own custody and administration. Those are the closest things in the book to a repeatable checklist.
What it actually teaches
The book does not give a sequential trading method. What it gives is a set of business components a fund needs in place, in roughly the order Wilson presents them.
BUILD THE FUND BUSINESS PLAN FIRST
Before marketing anything, Wilson wants a written plan covering management (who runs the fund if two or three key people vanish tomorrow), investment process and risk management, service providers, infrastructure, and marketing channels. He pairs this with a 15- to 25-page PowerPoint pitch book that should go through five internal drafts before any investor sees it, and should stay under 30 slides because 95 percent of recipients will not read past 15 pages.
PRICE AND SHOP YOUR SERVICE PROVIDERS
Wilson's own client data: a fund formation package should run $15,000 to $60,000 depending on complexity. He cites a 2009 case where a manager was quoted more than $80,000 for basic legal formation, about $35,000 above market. His fix is not picking the cheapest bid but interviewing at least three prime brokers, three auditors, and three administrators before choosing.
BUILD THE DUE DILIGENCE FILE BEFORE YOU ARE ASKED
The chapter on due diligence (written by Gregory Schink, not Wilson) puts a typical DDQ review at two to four months, sometimes longer, and treats a manager's willingness to let investors call his auditors, attorneys, and board members as the clearest signal of trustworthiness. A manager who cannot produce risk management documentation and sign-offs within 24 hours of a request is, in Rick Nummi's words in the book, showing you what kind of business he is really running.
INSTITUTIONALIZE AS ASSETS GROW
Wilson's list of what $1 billion-plus funds do that smaller funds skip: documented compliance and hiring procedures, a standing master DDQ kept current, international marketing coverage beyond the US and Europe, and three-to-seven-year strategic planning instead of month-to-month thinking. He frames the $100 million and $250 million marks as thresholds where institutional consultants start taking a fund seriously.
MANAGE THE INVESTOR RELATIONSHIP, NOT JUST THE TRACK RECORD
Consistency, in Wilson's read of his interviews, matters more to institutional allocators than a single strong number: a manager who changes position sizing, holding periods, or process gets flagged even if returns stayed positive, because inconsistency signals the process could change again. He puts the typical institutional sales cycle at 12 to 16 months and warns against checking in every few days during that window.
What it looks like Monday morning
A reader running a small or start-up fund walks away with a punch list, not a trading edge: get the DDQ built now rather than when an investor asks for it, get three competing quotes on legal formation instead of taking the first number, and stop leading pitch conversations with back-tested returns, which Wilson flags as a top-five sign of an inexperienced manager trying to overhype numbers investors will discount anyway.
It will not change how anyone trades, sizes positions, or manages risk in the portfolio itself. The book's value, such as it is, sits entirely on the capital-raising and operations side of the business, and a reader looking for method or edge in the markets will finish it with nothing new to apply.
Nobody trusts anybody, and they take the perspective that... they now need something more.Richard Wilson (paraphrasing Rick Nummi), The Hedge Fund Book
Where it fails
- It is not a trading book despite the title and the shelf category. There is no strategy, no entry or exit logic, no risk-sizing framework, and no worked trading example anywhere in its roughly 190 pages. Every numbered list in the book concerns marketing, compliance, hiring, or due diligence. A reader shopping this category for a method will have wasted the purchase.
- It assumes you already have capital, staff, and a track record. The advice on service provider selection ($15,000 to $60,000 in formation costs, interviewing three prime brokers) and on institutional marketing presumes a fund with real budget and an existing team. A solo trader with no assets under management and no employees has no use for chapters on hiring an HR function or building international sales coverage.
- The content is closer to paid promotion than independent analysis. Wilson discloses in the preface that he has financial interests in more than ten of the web sites and services referenced in the book (HedgeFundBlogger.com, the CHP Designation program, several investor-database products), and that three of the 25 people he interviewed had been his own consulting clients. The book repeatedly funnels readers toward his own paid training program and directories.
- The interview format pads the page count without adding new information. Roughly half the book is Q&A transcripts with marketers, compliance consultants, and fund administrators who largely restate the same three points (be transparent, be consistent, document everything) in different words. Stripped of the repetition, the actionable content would fit in a fraction of the page count.
- The regulatory and industry detail is now fifteen-plus years stale. The book was written in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 credit crunch and the Madoff case, and its due diligence chapter treats Dodd-Frank-era registration and reporting requirements as still emerging rather than settled law. A reader relying on it for current compliance thresholds or registration rules needs a 2010s-or-later source instead.
- The chapter-ending review questions and answer key point to a dead resource. Every chapter ends with multiple-choice review questions and directs readers to HedgeFundTraining.com for the answer key. That domain and the CHP Designation infrastructure the book leans on throughout are tied to Wilson's own business, which may or may not still be operating in its 2010 form; a reader should not count on those resources being live.
Who it is for
Buy it if
A reader who is actually building the business side of a small fund, capital raising, service provider selection, or preparing for institutional due diligence, and wants a quick orientation to the vocabulary and expectations of that process. It works as a cheap primer before hiring real compliance and legal counsel, not as a substitute for them.
Skip it if
Anyone shopping for a trading strategy, a risk model, or portfolio construction ideas. Also skip if you are allergic to a book that doubles as an advertisement for the author's own training program and web properties, since that promotional thread runs through nearly every chapter.
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