In today's volatile markets, managing risk is more important than ever. Investors are looking for downside protection while maintaining good returns--and market-neutral investing has become one of the hottest methods to meet that need. In this book, industry expert Joseph G. Nicholas explores new approaches to return enhancement and risk reduction through market-neutral strategies. Market-neutral investments are attractive because they have produced substantially better risk-adjusted returns than the market during the past ten years. The complexities created by the combination of longs, shorts, and leverage, however, make market-neutral strategies very different from conventional investments. Getting to know how these strategies work involves breaking them down into their basic components and then examining how those parts interact as a system with specific behavior characteristics. This book examines eight key strategies, revealing the source of their past returns and giving the investor tools with which to measure the possibility of repeat performance. Nicholas draws extensively on his company's database of over three thousand hedge funds and from the daily portfolio analysis conducted for hedge fund portfolios. He has also incorporated extensive input and actual investment examples provided by managers and practitioners of each of the strategies discussed in the book. This is the one book that looks at market-neutral strategies head-on, assessing those that have worked and some notable ones that have failed--and explaining why. Clear, insightful, and illustrated with numerous charts and graphs, Market-Neutral Investing is an invaluable guide for professional investors.