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Last week, I finished reading Hedgehogging by Barton Biggs. It was a fun read for me, with both seedy and glorious stories from inside the exclusive hedge fund world. Always with humor, he delved into the lifestyles, personalities, performance anxiety, and of course financial rewards of several managers. He didn’t use any real names, but it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to decipher who a few of his subjects were. Any of you are welcome to borrow the book.

Often discussing how an individual should go about seeking quality hedge funds for their own capital, one segment certainly caught my eye. In it, Biggs stressed the importance of where a manager is in their career cycle. For example, three different established managers were discussing whether if given the chance, they’d give up 5% of their fund’s performance for 5 strokes off their golf handicap. Several said yes and rationalized why. These were guys running hundreds of millions, at the least.

His point was that the optimal stage to start a relationship with a manager is after they can show a solid performance record, but before they have been doing so well for so long that the incentive diminishes. Here at Teewinot, we are arguably just approaching the beginning of that window. We appreciate our clients’ early faith in us.