Despite working as a financial journalist, the last thing I want to do is curl up over the weekend with a book on finance. After reading hundreds of press releases, analyst notes, financial news articles, industry websites and blogs over the course of the week, I am loathe to read something long-form about finance on my own time. I prefer Neil Gaiman or Chuck Palahniuk, personally. But when I was contacted by Timothy Sykes, who had what seemed like an interesting hedge fund story to tell, I made an exception and decided to give it a shot.

Sykes's book, An American Hedge Fund, is an interesting autobiographical tale of his trading life to-date. It's only around 250 pages long, mostly because Sykes is only 26. That's not to say he hasn't been trading a while -- he begins the book by chronicling how he began trading while in High School, using the library's Internet connection to research his picks.

The book is not a typical "how-to" guide to becoming a millionaire, although Sykes does detail some strategies that got him where he is today. More interesting, perhaps, is that he is able to set aside his ego and detail his trading flaws and the colossal failures they led him to make, which occasionally gives the book a "how-not-to" feel. Although Sykes's trading style, which focuses heavily on day trading risky micro-cap companies and on short selling, is worlds away from my comfort zone, which is much more large-cap value oriented, that doesn't mean I didn't learn and appreciate from seeing how his mind and his trading desk operate. I may have appreciated his technique more due to the stark contrast to my own.