Provenance
This standalone page was migrated from the February 2026 compendium corpus.
The Five Factor Analysis rests on three linked claims:
The old system broke. The post-1945 globalized order — where goods, capital, and energy flowed to whoever offered the best price plus shipping — has structurally deteriorated. The channel dates the acceleration to roughly 2019-2022 (tariff escalation through the Ukraine war). This is not a temporary disruption but a regime change expected to play out over 15+ years.
Countries now optimize for survival, not efficiency. Under the broken system, governments increasingly make decisions based on five domestic survival constraints:
- Food — Can we feed ourselves without adversarial dependency?
- Energy — Can we power our economy without controllable disruption?
- Technology — Can we manufacture critical goods domestically?
- Demographics — Do we have the people to sustain this?
- Security — Are we physically defensible?
Countries strong across all five factors have strategic freedom. Countries weak on multiple factors face compounding pressure that forces difficult policy choices — alliances, industrial subsidies, capital controls, and resource consolidation.
This creates a new investment map. Because private capital alone cannot fund the strategic buildouts required (the costs are too high, the timelines too long, the returns too uncertain), governments increasingly direct capital into constrained nodes: equity stakes in critical manufacturers, procurement mandates, pension fund redirection, subsidy programs, and sovereign fund creation. The investment opportunity lies in identifying the specific bottlenecks — materials, processes, routes, and facilities — where policy support and structural scarcity intersect.
The framework’s practical rule: if a problem can be resolved in months, it is a trade. If it requires 5-20 years to resolve, it is an investment theme. Rare earth supply chains, domestic semiconductor manufacturing, and critical mineral processing are investment themes. Quarterly earnings misses are trades.