Methodology version 1.0.0 · snapshot 2026-08-16
How this screen works, and what it refuses to do
This page is the contract. Nothing on this site may state a rule that is not here, and nothing here may omit a limit that applies.
What we refuse to do
No composite score. Markets are never ranked, scored, or ordered against each other, and no layer is combined into an index. A single number claiming to summarise a country is the most common way work like this becomes dishonest, so it is excluded architecturally rather than discouraged editorially.
No instrument-level view. Listed vehicles appear as market context. No buy, sell, hold, target price, or valuation opinion on any security, and no redistribution of exchange quotes.
No brokerage. We do not find, arrange, introduce, or broker property.
No implied freshness. Every value carries its observation date and its retrieval date, and a market past its review date labels itself stale rather than sitting quietly.
The layers
A layer is present for a market or absent from it. Absent layers are shown as absent. They are never imputed, interpolated from a neighbour, or filled in from a secondary summary.
| # | Layer | What it reads | State |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Currency and entry window | How much the entry price has moved for a foreign buyer through exchange rates alone. | Published |
| 2 | Valuation against own history | Where price sits against income and against rent, relative to that market's own past. | Withheld — licence not read |
| 3 | Foreign-buyer friction | What the law and the tax code actually do to a non-resident buyer. | Published where a primary source is cited |
| 4 | Financing conditions | The cost of money against asking prices. | In build |
| 5 | Supply against absorption | New supply against the capital and demand arriving. | In build |
| 6 | Listed against private | The same exposure priced publicly and privately. | Blocked on market-data licensing |
| 7 | Replacement cost | Build cost against secondary-market pricing. | Not started |
| 8 | Developer credit | A developer's cost of debt against the pricing of its projects. | Blocked on market-data licensing |
Currency is a modifier, not a thesis
A currency move only means something together with entry and exit friction, financing cost, and the local price trend. A market whose currency has fallen ten per cent is not therefore ten per cent cheaper: the discount can be erased by a purchase tax, trapped by an exit restriction, or already priced into local asking levels.
The denominator is the reader’s. Each market page expresses the same twelve months against several base currencies, because a market is cheap or dear relative to the capital entering it and not relative to an assumed dollar. Cross rates are derived from published reference rates quoted per euro, so the euro cancels and no third source is involved.
The twelve-month window uses monthly averages rather than two spot fixings, so a single volatile day cannot move a headline. The latest daily fixing is shown separately, because that is what a reader sees if they go and look.
Coverage
| Rung | What it means |
|---|---|
| INDEXED | Macro and currency context only. The honest default for most of the world. |
| OBSERVED | At least two layers computed from primary sources under recorded licences. |
| VERIFIED | An authored dossier with per-fact provenance, a counter-thesis, invalidators, and a named approver. |
| ACTIONABLE | A scoped research engagement can be delivered here. |
| TRANSACTABLE | A licensed partner can transact. No territory holds this rung. |
Two conditions sit beside the ladder rather than on it. rights blocked means a required licence is missing, expired, or ambiguous, and every dependent output is suppressed. stale means the market is past its recorded review date. A market can be verified and stale at once, and folding that into one rung would lose the part a reader needs.
How a signal becomes public
OBSERVE → WATCH → CONFIRMED | REJECTED → STALE. An automated process may author only the draft states. Advancing a signal and publishing it requires a named human approver recorded with it.
Signals are derived from layer values by published rules rather than written independently of them, so a signal can never be fresher than the data beneath it.
Rejected is published. A widely repeated thesis that fails its own test is the most useful thing this screen produces. The Singapore page exists because of one.
Revision and retrospective reading
Statistical agencies revise. Where a series is revised, today’s reading and the reading available at an earlier date differ, and only one of them reproduces a past decision. Our store keeps the date a figure was released separately from the date we first held it, and visibility is decided by the second.
A consequence follows that is easy to get wrong: history loaded today carries today’s knowledge date, so it cannot be used to reconstruct what was knowable a year ago. Retrospective reading is therefore restricted to series that are not revised — published exchange-rate fixings and policy rates — or labelled explicitly as hindsight over revised data. A backtest built on revised series is never presented as forewarning.
Corrections
Errors are corrected in place, with the correction and its date recorded on the page. Corrections are not silently overwritten.