The investment strategies of sovereign wealth funds : A reverse engineered pitch

This letter describes personal reflection based on the utilization of the Faff’s (2017, Pitching Research) pitch template for a reverse engineering technique in order to summarize, evaluate and properly interpret information from articles in respected scientific journals which represents key or seminal scientific research work upon which a researcher built his/her scientific work.


Introduction
One of the crucial preconditions for the final quality of a scientific study is performing effective search for relevant work in the field of the researched area.Literature review is inevitable part of "process of research" and interpretation of the researched findings predestines the final result and quality of every research work.Incorrect or incoherent interpretation of seminal article results can lead to confusion, significant delay and in extreme circumstances to the complete irrelevancy of the findings and complete waste of the researcher effort time and resources.Therefore, the consistent research and excellent understanding of the key articles relevant to the researcher work is required.Faff's (2017) pitch template is originally designed as a tool for providing a methodical approach to pitching a new research proposal to the expert audience however, this pitching tool can be utilized in many others ways and across various scientific sectors.For instance, research planning tool (e.g.Chang & Wee, 2016;Menzies et al., 2016); a research skills development tool (Faff, 2016); a research learning tool (Faff et al., 2016;Ratiu, 2016); for details see Faff (2017).
One of the possible applications of this pitching tool is using the template for transparent summary of seminal and key scientific works through the process generally known as a "reverse engineering" pitch in order to ensure the correct understanding of the findings, conclusions and methodology utilized in the research process.
This letter describes personal reflection on the utilizing the Faff's (2017) pitch template for the development of reverse engineering pitch for the Bernstein et al. (2013) "The Investment Strategies of Sovereign Wealth Funds", Journal of Economic Perspectives, 27(2): 219-38 which represents one of the key scientific article for my research work focusing on the Foreign Direct Investment generated by the Sovereign Wealth Funds and its impact on the market value of the acquired companies.

Sovereign Wealth Funds -topic overview
State owned investment funds also known as Sovereign Wealth Funds has undergone dynamic progression during the last decade.The global asset under management (AUM) of SWF soared from $2 billion in 2005 to $6.6 billion or even 7.1 billion in 2015 (according to UNCTAD).The total amount of AUM has doubled since 2008 and more than 30 new SWFs have been established since that.
The expression "Sovereign Wealth Funds" has been used for the first time in Rozanov (2005).The interest of financial regulatory authorities and academic sphere has been attracted during the financial crises 2007-2009 following the key role the SWFs played as almost only financial subject with available capital.
Entrance of SWFs upon the global financial podium has been spotted by academic sphere as well and after 2008 abundance of studies, conferences and research projects has been devoted to this topic.SWFs has been thoroughly scrutinized in the Bolton's (2012) book Sovereign Wealth Funds -Long term Investing summing up the results of conference named "SWFs and other long-term investors: A new form of capitalism".Investment strategy utilized by SWFs is described in Chhaochharia et al. (2009).One of the key and very often cited studies covering foreign investment strategies of SWFs is Kotter and Lela (2011 which on the large sample of investment (279 various companies in between 1980-2009], observes that SWFs investment strategy strongly resembling strategies utilized by large passive investment funds as pension funds for instance aiming at poorly managed companies in developed countries. Another complex study has been delivered by a team led by Shai Bernstein (2013) where the authors look at different investment strategies utilized by SWFs and based on the direct equity investments carried out by the sovereign funds investigate whether there are any significant differences in the investment behavior compare to the large pension funds.They also scrutinize the relation between the governance structure of SWFs and its propensity to invest into the domestic companies or prefer cross boarder investment.
Since 2008 dozens of studies and scientific papers has been issued covering various aspects of the SWFs phenomena.The quality and relevance of work has varied substantially and getting properly organized in this pell-mell of articles with contradictory results is rather difficult therefore, pinpointing the key studies and articles and correct interpretation of their results becomes challenging.

Personal reflection from using reverse engineered pitch technique
This section describes my personal experience with the utilization of the Faff's pitch template for one of the seminal economic studies devoted to the Sovereign Wealth Funds and its investment strategies developed by Kotter and Lela (2011).
Similar to Wallin and Spry (2016)  We also had an opportunity to apply the reverse engineering pitch approach with utilization of the Faff's pitching template to one of the research papers (process of research relevant article) for which we could subsequently compare our findings with the original pitch template created by the author.
As we worked in group of only two people with an article we have been familiarized with it was rather straightforward process which led us to consensus on the completion of the reverse engineered template quickly and effectively.However, once we have received an original pitching template, we realized that there was for certain parts (especially So What and What's new sections) which we had approached in a different direction.
Later, I have chosen two papers which I consider the most relevant to my research work and developed the reverse engineered pitch for both of them.
The results from the reverse engineered pitch of Kotter and Lela (2011) are shown in Table 1.
As a direct result from the applied structured approach guided by the Faff's pitch template I was able to quickly and effectively analyse this complex paper and identify main ideas, methodology and key findings of the study.Thanks to visualization of the research ideas incorporated in the article (and narrowing them down to the three most important) as pictured in the

Conclusion
Working with the Faff's pitch template is intuitive and significantly contributes to keep the logical line in summarizing any research work.After performing the reverse engineered pitch analyses for Kotter and Lela (2011) I realized, that in spite of the fact that I have been studying this particular paper several times and certain parts of my current research project is based on their methodology, I have missed particular details (especially with regard to the statistic approach to the data evaluation).
After finalizing the pitch template, I understand the structure and content of the Kotter and Lela research study significantly better.Therefore, I would recommend to all researchers to utilize this pitch template reverse engineering technique for future research work especially in the research literature review phase.

Figure 1 .Figure
Figure 1.Mickey Mouse diagram characterizing novelty of research idea I encountered the Faff's pitching template in an advanced phase of the Ph.D. program at the department of the International Business during the Training and Career Development Course for Early Career Researchers at the University of Economics, Prague.The structural approach initially used for facilitation of pitching research ideas helped me to realize certain inconsistencies within my own PhD work and showed me how to better (with higher consistency) explain what subject this thesis covers and what is its main contribution to the scientific research and who can possibly benefit from the work results and findings.