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FY2014-15 Report on Personal Research Program

Reflections and ‘lessons learned’ in FY2014-15 on my personal research program:

 

1. I spent much of FY2014-15 dealing with a rapidly changing higher education sector and university environment. The classical strategy of stable environments based on scale advantages no longer exists outside of Group of 8 universities. Two new operational models have instead emerged: a private equity-influenced emphasis on productivity, and a venture capital-influenced approach to revenue generation that uses a J-curve structure. As part of these shifts I learned more about business development, how to negotiate research contracts, and intellectual property.

 

2. I focused my personal research program on a core research area: the study of hedge funds and terrorist organisations as strategic subcultures. My personal research program has two projects: an on-going PhD at Australia’s Monash University, and the black box development of a quantitative trading system to self-finance future research. The PhD builds on the scholarship of Jack Snyder, Alastair Iain Johnston, Colin S. Gray, Ken Booth, David Haglund, Jeffrey Lantis, and others. I found new links with the work of Max Abrahms, David Aronson, Boaz Ganor, Timothy Masters, Lasse Heje Pedersen, and Nate Silver.

 

3. I deepened my approach to research design and methodology. An important part of this was reading books from the Cambridge University Press series Strategies for Social Inquiry; the Columbia University Press series Columbia Studies in Terrorism and Irregular Warfare; the Princeton University Press series Princeton Studies in International History and Politics; the Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology; and the German publisher Springer. I shifted from past work on critical theory to empirical methods.

 

4. I invested in specific resources to understand agent based models, computational social science, machine learning, and stream processing. These areas will enable my personal research program to grow in the future. They have also expanded my academic, industry, and social media networks.

 

5. I had one research publication for the year: a coauthored book chapter with Deakin University’s Ben Eltham in the Jeffrey S. Lantis edited book Strategic Cultures and Security Policies in the Asia-Pacific (Routledge, 2015), which was a reprint of a 2014 article for Contemporary Security Policy journal. I am publishing more slowly yet in higher quality outlets.

 

Some goals for my personal research program in FY2015-16:

 

1. Successfully complete Monash University’s mid-candidature review for my on-going PhD and continue with write-up.

 

2. Engage with causal analysis and process tracing as research methodologies. Continue to do related background reading for post-PhD research on Bayesian statistical inference and computational social science applications in counterterrorism.

 

3. Successfully backtest the following trading strategies: event arbitrage and mean reversion.

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Roy Christopher’s Summer Reading List 2015 + Bonus Material

I have some book suggestions in Disinformation alumnus Roy Christopher’s Summer Reading List 2015.

 

The emergent theme in my list this year is: the wealth extraction strategies of oligarchical elites and how to Become them.

 

Here is some bonus material I wrote that you might find useful:

 

Lasse Heje Pedersen Efficiently Inefficient: How Smart Money Invests & Market Prices Are Determined (Princeton University Press, 2015). Lasse Heje Pederson is the John A. Paulson Professor of Finance and Alternative Investments at the New York University Stern School of Business. Perdersen’s “efficiently inefficient” theory of financial markets focuses on active investors who have a comparative advantage. This book examines six economically motivated investment styles and eight hedge fund strategies. It contains one of the best descriptions I have read of how active management works. Pedersen also interviews influential hedge fund managers and investment managers including James Chanos, Cliff Asness, George Soros, Myron Scholes, Ken Griffin, and John A. Paulson. For a history of hedge funds see Sebastian Mallaby’s More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite (Bloomsbury, 2010).

 

Han Smit and Thras Moraitis Playing At Acquisitions: Behavioral Option Games (Princeton University Press, 2015). Han Smit is a Professor in the Faculty of Economics at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. Thras Moraitis was Group Head of Strategy and Corporate Affairs at Xstrata. Playing At Acquisitions offers a synthesis of three business strategy methodologies: behavioural economics, game theory, and real options. An in-depth case study on the company Xstrata is also provided. Smit and Moraitis provide a personal synthesis that will enable you to perceive your own cognitive biases, to understand others, and to make more effective decisions under uncertainty. For a conceptual understanding of business strategy see J.C. Spenders Business Strategy: Managing Uncertainty, Opportunity, and Enterprise (Oxford University Press, 2014).

 

Lauren A Rivera Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs (Princeton University Press, 2015). Lauren Rivera is Associate Professor of Management & Organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Pedigreefollows in the footsteps of Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca in examining how the processes of elite reproduction and social stratification occur in elite firms who hire students from elite schools into entry-level jobs. Rivera uses interviews and participant observation to discover how employers use a range of filtering mechanisms to reproduce elites in a way that is reminiscent of ancestral heritage and cultural transmission. This book also offers novel insights on the sociological study of contemporary elites and elite circulation. For a micro-study on elites, non-elites and economic stratification see Robert D. Putnam’s Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis (Simon & Schuster, 2015).

 

Karen Dawisha Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? (Simon & Schuster, 2014). Karen Dawisha is the Director of the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies at Miami University. Putin’s Kleptocracy was originally under contract at Cambridge University Press before potential libel concerns led to Simon & Schuster publishing the book. Dawisha uses archival, internet, interview, and other sources to show how Putin rose to power and how he and a small oligarchical elite succeeded in extracting economic wealth from post-Soviet Russia. Dawisha’s research informed the PBS Frontline documentary Putin’s Way (13th January 2015). Putin’s success at wealth extraction can be compared with Thor Bjorgolfsson’s Billions to Bust – and Back (Profile Books 2014) and Bill Browder’s Red Notice (Simon & Schuster, 2015) in which self-styled ‘adventure capitalists’ and emerging market financiers were not so lucky. On Putin’s use of sociological propaganda to restructure post-Soviet Russia see Peter Pomerantsev’s Nothing Is True And Everything Is Possible (PublicAffairs, 2014) and Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda Works (Princeton University Press, 2015).