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Financial speculation and global capital flows are topics that are frequently critically discussed in sociology but rarely studied in detail. As a result, we make assumptions of how financial investors behave. How do professional investors speculate on their national stock market, i.e., how do investors gain information and interpretation and how do they decide what to trade and when to execute? Research to date has focused on intra-day traders and short-term arbitragers rather than investors and has neglected to examine investment in low- and middle-income countries. To amend this, I conducted approximately 110 tape-recorded semi-structured ethnographic interviews with financial workers in Malaysia, including professional fund managers, brokers, stock market regulators and employees, financial journalists, and academics. Most of these interviews were designed to elicit narratives of the interviewees' own investment behavior or their work practices that contributed to others' investment behavior. The principle empirical finding is that fund managers and the asset management firms they work within are not the only principle decision-makers in the Malaysian stock market. Their brokers (who are often perceived by interviewees and the academic literature as mere typists, deceptive salespeople, or intermediary parasites) play a significant role in the investment behavior we observe. Fund managers' social network of brokers are: (1) a critical and nonfungible resource for providing information and interpretation; (2) allocated considerable cognitive labor in speculative decision-making, particularly in asset management firms dependent on extraorganizational resources, and (3) are delegated considerable autonomy in the timing and manner of execution of prior decisions. The influence of clients, mandates, and research analysts in the social cognitive network are found to be less important. The dissertation details the relationship between these agents in a social cognitive network that speculates in the stock market. Theoretical and conceptual issues addressed and modified in the dissertation include: greater specification into the role of information networks in the economy, particularly concerning cognition; a case study demonstrating the utility of distinguishing “execution” from other components of economic agency, and further specification and revision of our understanding of how stock markets function in a developing country.
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