Political risk analysis and asset management?

Dear Monkeys,

Currently working in M&A but looking to transfer over to AM due to interest in markets, personally I am a top-down investor and have academic background in international relations. I was wondering what would be a good area where one could use this kind of an approach:
1. Political risk/International relations analysis (qualitative) (I'm no econometrics whiz or anything)
2. Investing (buy-side shops)

Any ideas?

4 Comments
 

For political risk, you could try the Country Risk desk in a risk management team. However, it's not particularly exciting and the "analysis" tends to be more about reading and summarising reports prepared by political risk consultants rather than doing your own analysis. A lot of your job would be telling business units that they can't do a deal in Country X because the bank has hit your risk limits for that country and you'd have to get board approval to increase them.

TL;DR version - Country Risk in risk management is unsexy.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, post threads about how to do it on WSO.
 

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