About Valtor Partners

Written byZaro Gonzalezzaro@valtorpartners.comValtor Partners is written by Zaro Gonzalez, who reads International Relations at UNIE in Madrid. It asks to be trusted on its method, not on a title: every figure links to where it came from, so any claim here can be checked without taking the author's word for it.

Most writing about geopolitical risk stops at the point where it would become useful. It describes what happened and asserts that the consequences are serious. It rarely says which price should have moved, by how much, or what it would take to know whether the market agreed.

That gap is the work. Valtor takes a conflict event, states in advance which assets should respond if the standard story is right, measures what they did, and reports the answer even when the answer is that nothing happened.

How the work is done

Market reactions are measured with an event study: a window before the event to establish what normal looks like, a window around it to measure the departure, and a market model rather than a simple average, so a trend that was already running does not get counted as a reaction. Where a result depends on a choice — which day counts as the event, which index is the benchmark — the alternative choice is tested and reported too.

Four commitments

Every number carries its provenance. A figure on this site comes with what it measures, when it was true, and where it came from. Numbers appear in the margin beside the argument they support, so checking one does not mean leaving the sentence.

A figure that cannot be found is marked as missing. It is never estimated to fill a gap in a table.

Fact, inference and speculation are kept apart. What the data shows, what it suggests, and what is one possible reading are three different claims, and they are written as three different claims.

A null result gets published. The first test run here looked at Taiwan's currency around the August 2022 exercises and found the move was indistinguishable from noise. That is a finding about how the market read the event, and it is more interesting than the alarm it fails to support.

What Valtor will not do

It will not publish in a week with no signal. An archive padded with mediocre pieces destroys the only asset a research publication has. It will not forecast without stating the condition that would make the forecast wrong. And it will not repeat the consensus back to you with more adjectives.

Coverage

The Red Sea and Suez, the Strait of Hormuz, the Taiwan Strait, the Black Sea and the Baltic, and the energy Europe buys through them. These are the waters where military activity and shipping economics meet, which is where the transmission from conflict to price is easiest to measure honestly.

Questions and corrections: zaro@valtorpartners.com