New York's Leading Investment Strategy Conference Starts Next Week

In just a few short days,

and the

will start in New York at the Tribeca Rooftop. Scheduled to take place from December 4 through December 5, the two events are billed as the leading conferences of their kind.

"I had attended some conferences in the past," said

, an attorney at Mayer Brown. "One of the favorites and one of the most useful that I attended was Terrapinn's previous Quant Invest and HFT in Chicago in June of this year. It was well-attended, there were a lot of interesting talks, and I met a lot of people there. I thought it was very well run. I liked the networking opportunities before hand. "Terrapinn made available a list of available attendees and sort of set up a mini social media site so you could link with each other. They also encouraged networking at the conference itself. They attracted a lot of well-known speakers that gave good talks." Ziliak said that when he heard there was going to be another conference -- this time in New York City -- he wanted to attend "in part because a lot of New York and Connecticut hedge funds hadn't come to the Chicago version." "I thought, 'Let me get before those people as well," he said. "See who I can meet out there and what they're interested in. Find out what their concerns and legal needs are.' That's what got me thinking about it." Ziliak is scheduled to speak on a panel about AT9000. "That stands for Automated Trading 9000, which is a temporary number -- it's a reference to ISO 9000, which is the quality management system," he explained. "Regulators are looking more carefully at automated trading and high frequency trading in particular. You look at the flash crash, you look at the Knight Capital program in August, you look at things like this -- not to mention all the mini flash crashes that seem to happen all the time. There are lots of concerns out in the market about what happens with automated trading, sometimes because people do it badly and things go wrong. "Sometimes people do exactly what they intended to do but the algorithm interacted with one another in either unforeseen or some unfortunate ways and extreme or sometimes bad things happen. All of this means regulators are saying, 'We need to look at this more carefully.' But all of that is sort of dictated from above. It would be better for many reasons if the industry, from within, would come up with some best practices and some approaches to improve the quality of their output." Ziliak added that the AT9000 is an "endeavor in that direction." There are dozens of other

lined up for the conference, including Mike Dever, the Founder and CEO of Brandywine Asset Management. "A lot of what we have done in our own trading is redefine the portfolio allocation models and come up with things that truly worked, and not just fundamental constructs," Dever told Benzinga. "My talk is about mean-variance modeling and the flaws in the classic mean-variance model formulas that are out there." Dever also plans to talk about his book,

. "The book goes through investment myths that people believe to be true," he said. "I say why they might believe them to be true but why they're really a myth, not a fact. And then I give examples of ways people can take advantage and such and exploit those myths."