The Counting House

The Chief Investment Officer of a prestigious university sits at the center of modern finance: hundreds of hedge funds, venture capitalists, stock pickers, bond traders, and private equity managers visit him every year, asking for money.

He helms the engine room of the modern academy: the six-billion-dollar endowment he presides over allows the school to compete for students, faculty, prestige, moral purpose—and solvency. The CIO is a winner in bourgeois America’s highest dream: “doing well by doing good.”

And then all that he thinks he understands—about investing, about his own talents, about every choice and non-choice that brought his life to where it is—begins to fall apart. At first, slowly, amid endless fascinating conversations with his staff, his wildly talented (and sometimes hilarious) trustees, and the motley money managers that march through his office. And then quickly, in an epic showdown with a reclusive, legendary hedge fund manager, his university’s richest and most stingy billionaire alumnus.

With its wry appreciation for the absurd, The Counting House lays claim to the title of funniest novel about American business. Underneath the humor, however, is an unprecedented, necessary story of the inner life of investing: a story that reveals how the workings of our daily lives rest upon the market’s unforgiving truths.