It is a requirement at Southampton University that graduating students must write a dissertation. This presents a myriad of logistical problems. Students have never done anything like it in size or depth before, many are not good at writing English either because they have little experience of writing or because English is very much a second language to them.

Consequently, some of these students resort to unethical activities such as buying over priced and recycled rubbish off the Internet. Ethics aside, such rubbish will generally be picked up by Turnitin, as will work copied from the Internet or from dissertations already submitted to mainstream universities. That being so, the student is best advised to do the work himself.

I find that the best way to proceed is as follows: get some old dissertations to get a feel for what is required as regards size and quality; collect a relatively small and relevant number of academic articles from academic journals via Google Scholar or some such similar device.

Then, type out a one page Ariel 12 pt summary containing the following: the main hypotheses you are testing/ground you are exploring; the main academic articles you are going to use to show you are up to date with the topic you are addressing; the data you are going to use; the methodology you are going to use; the conclusions and policy issues you hope to reach. If you have all that on one page, you are in a good position to expand and finish your thesis to the specified requirements. Related articles address the many points raised in this short summary.

ps: I originally mis-spelled thesis. make sure to use a spell checker and number your pages before submitting a draft. No page numbers => you did not even read it.

Subjects in portfolio management often concentrate on the basic theories of the capital asset pricing model and the efficient market’s theory. Together, they give us a static equilibrium framework to gauge how large institutions should invest the funds entrusted to them. Traditional finance theory tends to be rather staid as it uses these deterministic models, which tend to over simplify things even as they capture the major expectational trade off between risk and return.

I am now increasingly trying to incorporate an applied element into my classes and to look at certain categories of stocks and certain sectors of the economy to help throw light on where, how and when investors in the real world might decide to operate. My revised notes also show how deregulation proved to be a major boon in the bull runs of the Clinton and Soviet melt down years. Related articles address the many points raised in this short summary.