“Because we had a very bad year.” Thus begins the existential crisis of the Chief Investment Officer of a prestigious college endowment whose failure to hit his performance targets leads him to profound questions about life, his job, his marriage, parenthood, and the philosophy of investing—and reveals more about the hubris, delusion, brilliance, hope, and disappointment on Wall Street than any novel in years.

With its wry appreciation for the absurd, The Counting House may be the funniest novel ever written about American business. Sernovitz’s story is rooted in an insider’s knowledge—and the insider’s language—of real people and real firms.

Known throughout simply as “the CIO”, Sernovitz’s protagonist 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.

Readers of this fast-paced novel, told mainly in dialogue, share in the thrill of a unique voice that blends high and low, literary and street-smart, numbers and people to tell a highly original story of the inner life of a professional investor: a story that reveals how the workings of modern life rest upon the market's unforgiving truths. Fans of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities and Michael Lewis’ The Big Short will revel in Sernovitz’s take on chasing alpha from the ivory tower.

Reviews

“My favorite finance novel of the past few years…. While I recommend it to anyone interested in the overlapping themes of a finance guy’s mid-life crisis and competing philosophies of investment management, I have one big fear: Was this written specifically for me? In the most micro-niche targeted way? Like, I might enjoy and relate to this book more than anyone else on the planet. It speaks to my interests and experiences in banking and finance.  First, there’s its level of specificity to 2000-to-2023-era hedge fund, private equity, quant fund and asset allocation characters. Sernovitz name-drops everybody who was anybody during that period. We meet, as the CIO meets, representatives of practically every institutional investment strategy of the past 25 years. Via the CIO’s jaundiced viewpoint, we get Sernovitz’s most skeptical view of each. And all his skeptical views very much worth reading because they are funny, insightful and multi-layered.”
— Michael Taylor, The Houston Chronicle

Last year I blurbed Gary Sernovitz’s novel, The Counting House, whose main character is the chief investment officer of a fictional university endowment. (I really liked it — it is not for everyone, but I think it is probably for a lot of Money Stuff readers.) Much of the book consists of somewhat comical pitch meetings, in which managers of hedge funds and private equity funds and lending businesses try to convince the CIO to invest some of the endowment’s money with them. The CIO is jaded: He has heard all this stuff before. There are only so many ideas, and he keeps hearing versions of them. He knows the weak points of each of them, knows before he asks the questions what the answers will be. The book is among other things a survey of the popular ideas in alternative investments in 2023, how they are pitched and what their flaws are.
— Matt Levine, Bloomberg Opinion

The Counting House…provides an erudite tour of the world of alternative GPs, or general partners—the men (almost exclusively) who run hedge funds and private equity shops. Sernovitz understands these asset classes deeply, showing how difficult it is for anybody to judge their sales pitch. The novel also casts its unblinking eye on the class of LPs—the limited partners who invest in alternatives… Sernovitz ensures that the stresses of the CIO's job manifest both physically and emotionally. In this case, however, the tension is alleviated by the CIO's droll sense of humor—at least until it threatens to curdle into nihilism… This is the most financially literate campus novel you'll ever read.
— Felix Salmon, Axios

Advanced Praise

"Gary Sernovitz, long one of my favorite writers, has very few literary parallels or precursors. A novelist who writes about the world of big-money finance, but who's also funny, observant, and emotionally acute? Nevermind that he's also a first-class storyteller with a peerless ear for dialogue, The Counting House takes its place alongside William Gaddis's JR and Richard Powers's Gain as one of the most absorbing and entertaining novels about American business ever written."
— Tom Bissell, author of Magic Hours

“Not since Liar’s Poker has the lowdown on high finance—its hustlers and hucksters, its VCs and B.S.D.s—been delivered with such insider’s knowledge or such human comedy. Better yet: this one’s a novel! In the university mega-endowment and its beleaguered team of managers, Gary Sernovitz finds an ingenious metaphor for the corrosions of American capitalism: the “growth” that crowds out growth, and all the pretty things the money underwrites…so long as you’re willing to trade away your soul.”
— Garth Risk Hallberg, author of City on Fire

“Blisteringly funny, intimidatingly smart, and also, somehow, deeply humane, The Counting House pulls back the curtain to show us the human beings behind the wheels of modern finance.  It is a book about money and wealth and their attendant absurdities, but it is also trying to do good and be good in the finance capitalist conundrums we are all muddling through.  In Sernovitz's hands, the world of investing and money management becomes hilarious, thrilling, and finally heartbreakingly sad: where, this book wants to know, do we find value in a world in which everything has a price.”
— Louisa Hall, author of Reproduction and Trinity

“Sernovitz is wise, dark, funny and perhaps most of all, brutally honest. He peels back the veneer of the money management business to reveal the brutal ways this world truly operates. A fun read.”
— Gregory Zuckerman, author of The Man Who Solved the Market

 "Beautiful, very funny and oddly inspiring. A true and hilarious account of what it is like at the coal face of modern high finance, and also a lovely portrait of what it is like to care very much about doing something very hard.”
— Matt Levine, columnist, Bloomberg Opinion