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Hedging Demystified

Paperback on hedging coming to market

Hedging Demystified

On July 1, 2019, Open Road Press will officially release in paperback Hedging Demystified: How to Balance Risk and Protect Profit. Written by experienced hedger, seasoned business professional, and award-winning author Tim Bishop, the book provides anyone who touches hedging in a business context with a basic understanding of the complex subject. It presents practical and straightforward examples of hedging and explains in plain English how it works.

Originally released in 2014 as an e-book called Hedging Commodity Price Risk: A Small Business Perspective, this primer on hedging has undergone a much-needed facelift. Tim Bishop talks about why:

The old title was not reader-friendly. Furthermore, it did a mediocre job of describing what the book contained and who it would benefit. The old title unnecessarily narrowed the target audience. Anyone anywhere who wants a better understanding of how futures, options, and swaps can manage financial risk will grasp the concept from this book. Business size is irrelevant as is the type of risk being hedged. Whether a business is hedging currency exchange, interest rates, weather, or more traditional commodities such as oil, corn, or coal, the hedging tools work in a similar fashion.

When I released this as an e-book, because of the cost of production and marketing I decided to table a print version and move on to other projects. My perception of the market size for the niche topic suggested it wasn’t worth a substantial investment. The ugly old red cover was a reflection of this stance.

That was before our transition to Small Press United in January 2019. As the small publishers’ arm of Independent Publishers Group, it offered us a cost-effective solution and ready access to important sales channels. I had already seen the book sell as an e-book, so a print-on-demand offering made sense.

Since I’ve begun marketing Hedging Demystified, however, some large organizations have expressed interest in using it to acquaint their constituents with the foundational principles of hedging. These organizations see the book’s potential as a marketing piece and a supplement to their own educational initiatives. Their clients often struggle to relate to them on the use of derivatives, which have tremendous potential to rescue business owners from economic catastrophe.

For more information about the upcoming release of Hedging Demystified, see this news release.