No. 01
The Rise of Financial Engineering
How executive compensation gradually shifted corporate priorities away from long-term investment and toward share-price optimization.
Research
The reasoning, before it is polished
Working notes, long-term projects, and half-formed ideas — the raw material behind the essays. Provisional by design.
Research Notes
Open notebooks, provisional by design
Data I am chasing, models I am stress-testing, and methodology I am still arguing with.
No. 02
Debt and the Illusion of Prosperity
Why borrowing can create the appearance of growth long before it creates lasting value.
No. 03
The Incentive Structure Behind Modern Markets
A framework for understanding why institutions behave the way they do.
Research Projects
Long-term research into why companies behave the way they do
Flagship ProjectComing Soon
Incentives Index
The Incentives Index is the flagship research project of Markets Without Spin.
Most investment research measures what companies have done.
The Incentives Index asks why they behave the way they do.
The project evaluates publicly traded companies by analyzing the incentives that influence management decisions, including executive compensation, insider ownership, capital allocation, stock buybacks, governance, accounting quality, shareholder alignment, and other factors that help distinguish long-term value creation from short-term financial engineering.
Our philosophy is simple:
Follow the Incentives.
Most investors ask what happened.
We ask why it happened.
The Incentives Index is currently under development and will eventually provide investors with an objective framework for evaluating whether corporate incentives are aligned with long-term shareholders.
Future Research Projects
Incentives Index
In Development
Buyback Machine
In Development
Government Incentives
In Development
Executive Compensation Database
In Development
Market Liquidity Research
In Development
Ideas in Progress
Thinking out loud, on purpose
The workshop floor. Some of these become essays, some become episodes, and some quietly fall apart.
The Dumb Money Theory
How automatic retirement contributions may be reshaping market valuations.
The Death of Price Discovery
What happens when passive investing overwhelms active decision making.
Follow the Incentives
A general framework for analyzing governments, corporations, and institutions.