California Dreamin’
May 10th, 2009 | Filed under: Today's Post
We’re in San Francisco this week for a conference with a strict “no media” policy. Regular readers will remember this event – which also occurs in Boston each fall – as “the event so secret we cannot speak its name”. But conspiracy theorists will be disappointed to learn that nothing nefarious goes on here. To encourage the free flow of opinions and ideas between mega-institutional investors, mega-hedge fund managers, and mega-academics we aren’t allowed to provide you with too much detail.
However, as usual, we plan to bring you the headlines and try to distill the various sessions into key themes and takeaways. The confab begins on Monday with presentations and panels featuring Nobel laureates and some of the world’s most well known hedge fund personalities. We’ll try to bring you a daily summary, but live-blogging is probably a non-starter on this one.
Before we do that, we thought we’d empty the hopper of stories that have caught our eye in the past couple of weeks, but never made it to the front page…
A Research Tax?
We love research here at AAA. But even we have stopped short of demanding that investors pay a tax to fund its creation. UK-based consultancy PIRC, however, is advocating that all investors pay into a pool to fund research on two topics in particular: the role of incentives in financial markets and the effect of short selling.
“A number of years ago, in the wake of the bursting of the dot-com bubble, mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot [AAA ed: a previous speaker at aforementioned secret event] proposed in a book on financial market volatility that Wall Street firms be required to fund research into market behaviour. Although not enacted, we consider this a very practical proposal, and one which could be applied more widely. Detailed research should be undertaken into what impact shorting has. This should be a very wide-ranging review, considering not only factors such as liquidity and market efficiency, but also trading costs, the impact on company management, investor sentiment and so on.” More…
To continue reading this article please login (at the right) or click here to learn more about accessing our archives.
