by ilene - September 17th, 2009 5:41 pm
Telluride Asset Management LLC v. Eric Falkenstein has been settled but the pain lingered on for many years. I learned about the case recently while reading Eric’s blog and wanted to learn more. Eric kindly agreed to share his experiences in an exclusive interview, and over the last week has been educating me in trade secrets and intellectual property law.
The Limits of Intellectual Property
Are There Any in the Hedge Fund World?
By Ilene
So who is Eric Falkenstein and how did he become an ex-portfolio manager with no portfolio to manage?
Eric graduated from Northwestern with a PhD in economics and wrote his dissertation on cross sectional stock returns and volatility. Prior to joining Telluride as a hedge fund manager in 2004, he had been using strategies that drew upon his education, previous work running his own fund and a fund, Deephaven.
Eric resigned his position at Telluride in September, 2006. Several months later, Telluride initiated a lawsuit claiming that strategies used by Eric belonged to Telluride. The claims in the lawsuit would require a court to determine the nature of the components of the strategy Eric had been using and decide who owned them. This is more complicated than it may appear.
Consider this analogy. Baker E goes to work baking sugar cookies for Bakery B. E, who’s been a baker for ten years, has a favorite recipe calling for flour, butter, sugar, eggs and baking soda. During the next few years, E tinkers with the ratios of ingredients and experiments with chocolate frosting and colorful sprinkles, but never deviates significantly from the basic recipe.
Then one day, Baker E decides to leave Bakery B and open a Cookie Shoppe C in another town. Bakery B initiates legal action to prevent E from operating C, arguing that E’s cookie recipe will inevitably be derived from privileged information gained while working for B.
In response, Baker E argues that his recipe is a standard sugar cookie recipe, using common ingredients. He argues that B cannot own the sugar cookie constituents (sugar, flour, butter, etc.), and that B needs to define the specific recipe in its complaint. Bakery B argues they will provide that, after full discovery has been completed (which could be a few years).
And so began Eric's adventure into IP law.
In a hedge fund “trade secret” case, the “ingredients” are variables used to construct
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Tags: accruals, capital issuance, confidentiality agreements, discovery, Eric Falkenstein, Finding Alpha, Hedge Funds, intellectual property, mean variance optimization, profitability, Telluride, trade secrets, volatility
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by ilene - July 17th, 2009 1:27 pm
I don’t often post book reviews, but this one by Eric Falkenstein is particularly intriguing. I’d also like to welcome Eric as our newest contributor to Phil’s Stock World. Eric’s an economist, author of the book "Finding Alpha," and Managing Member of CapRock Advisors. – Ilene
With Danny Kahneman’s Nobel prize in economics every other week has a big-name author or journalist writing a breathless article about how the new ‘behavioral economics’ will fix sterile financial theory. Alas, way back in 1951 this was a tired theme. George Stigler noted "each decade, for the past nine or ten decades [
ie, back to 1851!], economists have read widely in the then-current psychological literature. These explorers have published their findings, and others in the field have found them wanting—wanting in useful hypotheses about economic behavior."
Take, for example, the anchoring bias, where people do not adjust their prior beliefs sufficiently when presented with new data. On the other hand, there’s the case where people do not sufficiently account for base rate information, as for example when they are told a woman is quiet and assume she’s a librarian, not saleswoman, even though there are more saleswomen than librarians. Thus, over, or underreaction to information is a common ‘bias’, and so Kahneman’s classic work Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases surveys papers from the 1970s! After a generation, the low hanging fruit has been picked, and where are we? Momentum and mean-reversion are part of the ‘new’ finance, and George Soros proudly notes that his theory of markets has markets biased—though it could be in either direction. Yet, these are not really discovered by behavioral economics, but explained by it on a case by case basis. Prospect theory teaches us that people overweight, or underweight, extreme observations in various contexts. These insights are no more useful than saying the effect of X on Y ‘could go either way, depending on a bunch of other information we probably won’t notice until after the fact’.
A new book about psychiatry, Doctoring the Mind by Richard Bentall argues that the science of the mind is hardly a successful science. He argues that mental illness is on the increase and sufferers in the developed world with access to psychiatric care actually fare
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Tags: Doctoring the Mind, Eric Flakenstein, Finding Alpha, psychiatry, Richard Bebtall
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