Chasing the Same Signals: How Black-Box Trading Influences Stock Markets from Wall Street to Shanghai

Chapter 3. The Black-Box Philosophy

Why the Best Hedge Funds Don't Attend Conferences

Every year in September, investment professionals from the world's top investment firms are invited to attend one of the industry's most individual and exclusive investor conferences, it's hosted by an independent Asian research firm known as Credit Lyonnais Securities Asia (CLSA).

The CLSA conference is an annual event held in Hong Kong, featuring 1,000 of the world's top fund managers and 500 company executives. The conference line-up and agenda are what makes it unique and sought after by the industry's elite money managers. The CLSA line-up brings together a colorful assortment of thought-provoking topics and forward-thinking industry leaders, not to mention rock and pop icons from the 1970s.

At the 2007 CLSA conference, the headline speaker was Bob Geldof, the former lead singer from British rock band The Boomtown Rats and world-renowned political activist for the eradication of African poverty. From the time he launched the 1985 LiveAid concert, Geldof had pursued a lifelong campaign to raise awareness of ongoing starvation in Africa nations and the policies that maintained their plight of poverty. Geldof had spent most of 2005 on a year-long study of Africa's problems, deemed the "Commission for Africa," initiated at the request of Tony Blair.

He was uniquely qualified to address CLSA conference's attendees on the economic, political, and geographical problems in Africa. He was also uniquely ...