Research
MorMag believes rigorous research is the foundation of effective capital allocation. Our analysis combines macroeconomic insight, company-level fundamentals, and long-term structural thinking to identify opportunities across global markets.
Featured Research
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
Karl Marx's observation that history repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, offers a powerful framework for examining how societies, institutions, and financial markets reproduce familiar patterns under changing historical circumstances. At MorMag, we view economic and financial history not as a sequence of isolated events, but as an evolving process in which institutional memory, collective behaviour, and recurring structural vulnerabilities can cause past mistakes to reappear in new and often deceptively familiar forms.
Inside the MorMag Quant Lab (V)
Quantitative investment research seeks to translate complex market behaviour into structured analytical frameworks through statistical inference, mathematical modelling, and computational experimentation, while recognising the limits of what models can reliably capture. At MorMag, the Quant Lab brings these disciplines together to investigate uncertainty, regime change, market structure, and portfolio behaviour, using quantitative outputs to inform human judgement rather than attempting to replace it.
Stress Testing Beyond Historical Data
Historical data provides an important foundation for risk analysis, but the future can contain combinations of shocks, regimes, and market conditions that have no direct precedent in the available record. At MorMag, we view stress testing as a forward-looking discipline in which portfolios must be examined against plausible but unfamiliar scenarios rather than assuming that historical experience defines the full range of future risk.
Self-Organisation in Markets
Self-organisation describes how coherent patterns and structures can emerge from the interactions of individual agents without requiring central coordination or control. At MorMag, we view markets as complex adaptive systems in which prices, liquidity, trends, and collective behaviour can emerge from decentralised interactions between participants responding to changing information and incentives.
Narrative Cognition and the Psychology of Groupthink
Narrative cognition describes the human tendency to organise complex information into coherent stories, while groupthink can cause shared narratives to become increasingly resistant to challenge or contradictory evidence. At MorMag, we view markets as complex adaptive systems in which collective beliefs can spread through social networks, reinforce one another, and influence investment behaviour even when the underlying narrative is only weakly supported by evidence.
The Art of Being Approximately Right
The art of being approximately right recognises that financial decisions are rarely made with complete information or precise forecasts, making robust judgement more valuable than the illusion of perfect accuracy. At MorMag, we view investment as a process of managing uncertainty through probabilities, ranges, and asymmetric outcomes rather than attempting to eliminate uncertainty through false precision.
The Economics of Market Making
Market making plays a central role in financial markets by facilitating trade, providing liquidity, and helping to connect buyers and sellers in the presence of uncertainty and information asymmetry. At MorMag, we view market makers as important components of a complex adaptive system, continuously balancing inventory risk, information risk, and liquidity provision in the process of shaping market prices and trading conditions.
State-Space Models and Hidden Financial Systems
State-space models provide a framework for understanding financial systems in which the variables that drive observed market behaviour cannot be directly observed, but must instead be inferred from imperfect and noisy data. At MorMag, we view markets as complex adaptive systems whose underlying regimes, conditions, and structural dynamics are often hidden beneath observable prices and returns, making inference as important as measurement.
Treasury View and Keynesian Economics
The Treasury View and Keynesian economics represent competing perspectives on how public expenditure affects private investment, aggregate demand, and economic activity, particularly during periods of weak growth and unemployment. At MorMag, we view fiscal policy through the interaction of scarce resources, expectations, financial conditions, and private-sector behaviour rather than treating government spending as either inherently productive or inherently restrictive.
Pavlov and His Dog
Pavlov’s experiments demonstrated how repeated associations can transform previously neutral stimuli into powerful behavioural signals, providing a foundational insight into the mechanisms through which behaviour is learned and reinforced. At MorMag, we view markets as complex adaptive systems in which investors can similarly develop conditioned responses to prices, information, incentives, and recurring patterns of market behaviour.
Fabian Strategy and Long-Term Investing
The Fabian strategy is traditionally associated with patience, incremental progress, and the pursuit of long-term objectives through adaptation rather than confrontation, offering an unconventional framework for thinking about investment strategy. At MorMag, we view long-term investing as a process of compounding, adaptation, and disciplined capital allocation in which success can depend less upon predicting immediate outcomes than upon preserving the capacity to act over time.
Signal Discovery Frameworks
Signal discovery frameworks seek to identify patterns and relationships that contain useful information within the vast quantities of noise generated by financial markets, while recognising that apparent signals can be unstable, spurious, or regime-dependent. At MorMag, we view signal discovery as a process of disciplined inference in which statistical evidence, economic reasoning, and changing market conditions must be considered together rather than treated as isolated predictive inputs.
Evolutionary Competition Among Investment Strategies
Investment strategies operate within competitive environments where capital flows toward approaches that appear successful, while changing conditions can gradually weaken strategies that once thrived. At MorMag, we view markets as adaptive ecosystems in which investment strategies compete for capital, respond to one another, and evolve alongside the environments in which they operate.
Why Humans Need Explanations for Randomness
Humans possess a powerful tendency to search for patterns, causes, and narratives, often constructing explanations for events that may be substantially influenced by chance and randomness. At MorMag, we view this impulse as a fundamental feature of decision-making in complex environments, shaping how investors interpret information, assign causality, and respond to uncertainty.
Why Great Investors Think in Systems
Great investors are often distinguished not by their ability to predict individual events, but by their capacity to understand how incentives, behaviours, institutions, and economic forces interact within larger systems. At MorMag, we view markets as complex adaptive systems in which long-term investment success depends upon recognising feedback loops, interdependencies, and the emergent dynamics that shape outcomes over time.
Adverse Selection as a Market Tax
Adverse selection arises when differences in information between buyers and sellers distort market participation, causing uncertainty about quality to influence prices, behaviour, and the composition of transactions. At MorMag, we view adverse selection as a form of market tax in which information asymmetry can reduce market quality, increase transaction costs, and gradually drive well-informed or higher-quality participants away.
The Financial Instability Hypothesis
The Financial Instability Hypothesis argues that periods of stability can encourage increasing leverage, risk-taking, and speculative finance, gradually creating the conditions for financial fragility and crisis. At MorMag, we view financial instability as an endogenous process in which changing expectations, credit structures, and risk-taking behaviour can transform stability itself into a source of systemic vulnerability.
Austrian Economics and Financial Markets
Austrian economics places uncertainty, entrepreneurial discovery, capital allocation, and the coordinating role of prices at the centre of economic analysis, offering a distinct perspective on how financial markets process dispersed knowledge. At MorMag, we view markets as complex adaptive systems in which prices emerge from decentralised decisions, changing expectations, and the continual interaction between knowledge, incentives, and uncertainty.
The Recession Reflex
Expectations of recession can become economically consequential when households, businesses, investors, and policymakers alter their behaviour in anticipation of weaker conditions, potentially turning pessimistic expectations into realised contraction. At MorMag, we view recessions not only as outcomes of underlying economic conditions, but as dynamic processes in which expectations, feedback loops, and collective behaviour can interact to amplify economic fragility.
How Machiavellian Was Machiavelli?
Machiavelli is often remembered as the archetype of political cunning, associated with manipulation, deception, and the ruthless pursuit of power, yet his writings offer a considerably more nuanced account of human behaviour and political strategy. At MorMag, we examine Machiavelli not simply as an advocate of manipulation, but as a theorist of incentives, uncertainty, power, and the strategic behaviour of individuals within complex social systems.