The Thomson Reuters Asia Pacific Buy-Side Summit brought the Asia Pacific Investment Community together to discuss the latest trends in buy-side management, trading and technology. Here are some of the highlights: A common theme was that due to challenging market conditions, the buy-side must do more with less, and technology is the best way to gain efficiency. Costs are important, but not a primary driver of decision making. The focus of the customer basis was on finding new sources of alpha, establishing best practice around unbundling and enhancing and ensuring best practice in the investment process The breakout panels delved

Often one hears the phrases “dumb” money and “smart” money when commentators are discussing financial market participants. Such classifications are not only arbitrary they are also meaningless. More than twenty years toiling away both on the sell-side and the buy-side side has taught us that asset markets are great levellers. There are countless instances where “smart” money suffers traumatic P&L underperformance (one prominent, and unquestionably smart, UK hedge fund manager has had a rather torrid time of it over the past 18 months) while “dumb” money has shined [1] [2]. Additionally, even those investors with proven strong investment track records