Geopolitical Alpha by Marko Papic is an ambitious piece of work that is possibly the first of its kind. It attempts to show investors how they can sharpen their political analysis skills in order to derive extra profit from financial markets. I have to admit that the greater part of this book is very much beyond me as I don't have any training in political science and really hated my Constitutional law classes, but I will try to distil its key ideas and apply it to the SE Asia context.
There are three pillars to political analysis for investors :
a) Dialectic Materialism
The first point of geopolitical analysis must be attuned to the material. The substance is more important style. At every step, the analyst needs to ask themselves what the material constraints are. The rest of the book discusses the various constraints which are political, economic, and geographical as primary points of consideration....