[.ca] Extreme Value Hedging: How Activist Hedge Fund Managers ... (ISBN 0470128003)

I Learned How Activist Hedge Fund Managers Make Deals Happen:
Any person who is any bit involved in the business world or has a fondness for the markets will have no problem reading and enjoying your book. I read a lot of business books, even ones involving stocks and mergers and they are often not as easy to follow as this book. This thoughtfully researched book is one of the best books I have read. It is a great introduction to the arena of activist hedge fund managers and how they influence companies behind the scenes. I am surprised that there is a whole hidden world of investors (activist hedge fund managers) that have so much power to make or break the big deals we read about in the financial papers. The chapters are sprinkled with examples from the activist playbook - and the tactics of companies dealing with an activist uprising. The writing is even-handed and the anectodes -- especially the several regarding public campaigns by activist managers -- make for engaging reading.

Corporate raiders aren't what you may think they are:
This comprehensive look at the world of shareholder activists illuminates a subject that is widespread by very underreported. Have you ever wondered why , all of a sudden it seems, a CEO resigns, or a company sells off chunks of itself, or it gets acquired by someone else? Or maybe you have worked in a firm in which one of these pheonemona happened. It's possible that what you just witnessed had in its origins with a shareholder activist's view that a company share price was too low, or its CEO paid too much in terms of the company's performance. Waging campaigns that range from the very public, to the discrete, from the creative to the legally agressive, these activists could be described as the democratic warriors of the publicly traded world. Their principle generally boils down this: any company that lists itself on a public exchange has an obligation to obtain the best possible performance for the firm as expressed in the stock price. And so these warriors take up the battle. Often taking on self-satisfied excecutives, or firms that have just gotten lazy and may be sitting on a huge pile of cash for a rainy day, instead of reinvesting those funds in the business. And so these warriors take small stakes in these firms, and use tools all sorts of means from SEC filings, to newspaper ads, proxy share notices and any other means at their disposal to make change happen, and as a result increase the value of the company. Many of these firms are small to medium cap firms - the ones often overlooked by Wall Street analysts, and hence, have little public scrutiny. Orol chronicles these battles in a direct fashion that captures the essence of the stakes that are at play, as well as, the motives, emotion, and single pursuitedness of many of these activist investors. I would recommend this book to anyone in investor relations, those in business school and any private investor. This book is a peek into a world that few see.