Journal: The Inside Traveller

While travelling recently, I hit on a new idea for an investment strategy. Dubbed the "Hors d'Ouvres" method, it takes advantage of a little known and under-used source of publicly available information about forthcoming business events. Although it requires a small up-front commitment, and the ability to travel, it has the perquisites of luxury accommodations, sumptuous afternoon snacks, and rubbing shoulders with accidentally-rich and willfully-blind quasi-celebrities. The technique also provides the techno-social benefit of increasing the weighting of IS-security considerations into the efficient-market equations.

It works like this:
1- Every night you stay at a different hotel. The main consideration in selecting your target hotel is that it must provide shared office facilities, including a WINTEL PC, preferably in an "exclusive", executive lounge setting featuring after-the-bell hors d'ourves.
2- Peruse the publicly available documents available in the repositories labelled "Recycle Bin" and "My Computer".
3- Invest according to your new-found investment and business knowledge.
4- Vary the location of hotels in accordance with desired mix of your investment portfolio. For example, hotels in Chicago tend to provide high exposure to commodities markets, Los Angeles for entertainment industries, New York for industrials.
5. Note that this technique tends to provide negative-alpha investment ideas, and is therefore biased toward short positions.

Theory

The technique is founded on the observation that many executives consider themselves to be "business people", and therefore above the mundane requirement to understand or observe good security practices: they employ underlings who do that for them. As a consequence of this hubris, many excellent strategy documents are publicly disclosed in the obscure repositories cited above, where they are available for the profit of intrepid investment researchers.

Obligatory disclaimer:
The author is not an investment advisor, nor a lawyer, and nothing in this article is intended as investment or legal advice. Readers are urged to take responsibility for their own actions, especially in matters of IT security and investing.