Email: matthewthagerty@gmail.com

ANALYSIS

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

When is a market actually tradable? Measuring price impact and exit horizons in Venezuelan equities after the January 2026 transition, this deck finds a $5M position would take over a year to exit and carries ~2,000× the price impact per dollar of comparable Colombian stocks. This is a structural ceiling to capital market growth in Venezuela that political change alone cannot lift. Slide deck available here.

RESEARCH

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 also document a shift in corporate finance, where subscriptions act as interest-free loans from customer to firm, paid upfront and decoupled from usage. This has significant capital structure implications: firms that adopt subscriptions hold less cash and grow faster relative to their pre-adoption baselines. The result is a valuation sensitivity to regulatory shifts: a study of abnormal stock market reactions of subscription-exposed firms around FTC regulatory events suggests that markets may price the slice of this float exposed to regulation 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 outsized in a way comparable equities never show. 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 — that everything markets "know" lives in three inseparable layers of learning: Semantic, Syntax, and Structural. Surveys the contemporary academic literature on how market participants learn and how information is impounded in asset prices. Ranges from Bayesian updating to the Count of Monte Cristo to Gödel, Escher, Bach, to the strategic behavior of orcas. Available on SSRN.