Here are some key quotes from my latest podcast with Katherine Burton – groundbreaking journalist, author, and Bloomberg News reporter – sharing the journalist’s perspective on the alternative fund industry:

“A person who I barely knew called me and said, ‘I’m an investor in Long Term Capital Management. These guys are blowing up.’ And I rushed to his office and he gave me the letter. And I wrote a story.”

“People always think that it’s going to be slow in the summer, but then we often have a financial crisis in the summer, for example. So it really varies. And people try and sneak in, you know, bad news around holidays.”

“They’re definitely the people who I started with at Bloomberg, a lot of them have gone up into management. But that was just never the path that I wanted to take. Why I wanted to be a reporter was to be a reporter and a writer and not a manager.”

“I guess the lessons that I learned about money management [while writing my book] was that everyone who was successful definitely has a process. And they get into trouble when they vary from that process.”

“Sometimes I’ll be working on a story, and I’ve learned that the best thing to do is – as much as possible without giving away some big secret – is to talk to people about the stories you’re working on, because you never know who’s going to know something.”

“So we try not to write stories about very small managers. But that’s not to say that we don’t talk to people like that to sort of follow their career and get ideas and maybe put them into a story as part of a bigger story, but not just a story about them alone.”

“And so if they’re that kind of manager that’s very transactional, then they need someone within their organization who will deal with us, who’s more relationship driven, because I think that’s the way the relationship works best.”

“I think we learned about too much leverage with LTCM. I think with Amaranth, we learned about overconcentration in a trade. Madoff, we certainly learned a lot about due diligence. And so I think people won’t make mistakes in those areas again, or as big mistake.”