a little note on herd behavior

So in his recent book, John Authers summarized:

Institutionalized investment pushes investors to move in herds: Paying fund managers a percentage of the assets they manage and judging them against peers encourages them all to do the same thing.

This is making me wonder if this is really the fact, then shouldn't these investors do their job in Asia or those emerging markets where their own societies are said to be collectivistic. Since then, the chance that they follow each other is much higher than in the developed, and individual world. There's rarely a contrarian in Asian stock markets, compared to the Western markets. Because, a contrarian should have a lot of liquidity; and in the developed world, people are brought up and taught to be different, unlike the Asian countries.

Once participating in the emerging markets (the collectivistic), there could be a case that model is used to measure the herd behavior, with on-time and correct inputs. However, the markets should be big enough so that a few individuals cannot have effect on the markets which is sometimes the cases in the emerging ones.

Interesting talk - Zeigeist Europe 2010

a note for my quick observation

Subscribe your tweeter to Techcrunch or subscribe its RSS reader, you can get a day a hundred links for news of new tech stuff. I'm a daily reader of the site, to learn more about the internet industry which I do not really belong to (but I'm working for one kind of company). It occurred to me that there're lots of innovations and new things happen to the industry, news that can make you feel overwhelmed like things happen with the financial industry, even when it's in the crisis. The innovations in the industry to me, sometimes change as fast as the Dow.

The difference about the two is that the Dow can go up and down extravagantly, 14k when I was in the States in 2007, to 6,000 and now 10,000. But with the tech stuff, it seems that there's no deterioration, at least like the financial ones. Isn't it worth working for the IT and technology industry than working for a financial firm where you spend days by days with money, having no control of it, indeed? For developers, they would answer 'yes', I think, for the meaning of the job.
However, most of the young internet and media companies (I'll do the research for the stats when having some time) are financed by the venture capitalists and private equity firms. Still, the entrepreneurs need financial firms.

P.S: the job for a risk manager in the banking/ financial industry and the job of any kind of 'risk manager' in the internet area is difficult and head-aching as equivalent. Or is it not?