Email: matthewthagerty@gmail.com

ANALYSIS (completed during Ph.D.)

When Theatrical Signals Convert to Streaming (and When They Don’t) - Evidence from Netflix original films and synthetic box office benchmarks (June 2026)

Traditional studio film finance operates in a spot market relying heavily on pre-release signals like franchise history, star power, and massive budgets to convince viewers to pay a sunk cost at the box office. Streaming video platforms, however, largely run on subscriptions where different economic rules apply: revenue is pooled across a bundle, and algorithmic distribution routes viewers to new titles at near-zero marginal cost, allowing platforms to cross-subsidize a massive portfolio of smaller, exploratory bets.

This analysis asks whether the expensive signals that price theatrical risk translate to streaming success. By matching 408 Netflix original films that reached the U.S. Daily Top 10 to synthetic box-office comps, I find that theatrical pedigree converts to streaming engagement at roughly one-fifth strength: a 10-point gain in expected theatrical rank buys about 2 points of streaming rank. Sequels and animated films still out-chart other titles, but fall well short of what their theatrical pedigree predicts, while documentaries and romantic comedies hold up best relative to their comps. Netflix's originals cluster on content with low-grossing theatrical comps, and those bets supply many of the breakouts, a pattern closer to venture capital than traditional studio finance. Slide deck available here.

Data provided by The Numbers, via OpusData.

Caracas Stock Exchange (BVC) - Institutional Capacity Assessment (March 2026)

When is a market actually tradable? Measuring price impact and exit horizons in Venezuelan equities in light of the January 2026 transition, this analysis finds that exiting a $5M position would take over a year, with roughly 2,000× the price impact per dollar of Colombian stocks with similar trading volume. This reflects a structural constraint on capital market growth that political change alone is unlikely to resolve. Slide deck available here.

ACADEMIC RESEARCH (completed during Ph.D.)

Dissertation: Floats, Frictions and High Frequency Fundamentals: Essays on Modern Valuation

Advisors: Samuel Hartzmark, Vincent Bogousslavsky, David Solomon

See my dissertation defense slides here.

The Subscription Float: Recurring Revenue as Corporate Financing (2026)

Subscription revenue models have come to dominate the technology, media and entertainment industries—among others—with the share of all public firms citing them rising from ~20% to ~50% over the last two decades. I find that management most frequently cites “revenue predictability” and “customer stickiness” in regulatory filings as reasons for subscription adoption.

I argue that subscriptions function partly as customer financing: payments arrive in advance and are decoupled from usage. Firms that adopt subscriptions hold 2.3–2.6% less cash relative to assets and grow assets faster than their pre-adoption baselines. Stock market reactions to the FTC's 2024 subscription actions suggest markets value exposure to regulation of cancellation frictions at roughly 2% of firm value. Available on SSRN.

The Value of Velocity and the Velocity of Value (2023)

In an amusement park, a longer queue usually signals a better ride; all else equal, however, an empty queue is an ideal experience. An empty nightclub, by contrast, is always a failure. So it goes with financial assets: for some, a trade merely signals a value that already exists, and a lower price for the same asset is strictly better; for others, like Bitcoin, trading both signals value and creates it, because the network is, in large part, the value.
Using high-frequency data across major exchanges, this paper shows these competing valuation mechanisms leave a fingerprint even at the millisecond scale: the compensation for trading against better-informed players vanishes within seconds, yet price impact stays larger than in most comparable equities and ETFs. Available on SSRN.

The Pedagogical Price: On the Three Layers of Learning in Empirical Asset Pricing (2022)

An essay arguing that price is not a number but a process, and that what markets 'know' lives in three inseparable layers of learning: semantics, syntax, and structure. I use this framework to survey and classify recent work on learning and information in asset pricing, including debates over the 'factor zoo' and out-of-sample prediction. Ranges from Bayesian updating to the Count of Monte Cristo to Gödel, Escher, Bach, to the strategic behavior of orcas. Available on SSRN.