Inside the mind of a (fictional) billion-dollar allocator

What’s it like to be the CIO of a billion-dollar endowment?

Pretty boring, suggests a new novel by Gary Sernovitz. In The Counting House, the unnamed CIO of a major college endowment evaluates managers, frets about performance, and muses about the purpose of investing.

It makes for an unusual book, and one that has little risk of being optioned into a Hollywood blockbuster. It also has a lot of good jokes. (As an Emerging Europe hedge fund begins its presentation, the CIO ponders: ‘Emerging Europe? Hadn’t Europe emerged in 1000 BC?’)