Ranking Is Not Sizing
Every capital process ranks its options. Almost none sizes them — and the sizing is where the money is won or lost.
Coming soonSizingNotes from the capital committee
Long-form essays on how capital decisions actually go wrong — and the quantitative habits that fix them. Written from the data: post-mortems, benchmark studies, and the patterns we see running live allocations. No gated PDFs, no lead forms. Just the essays.
Latest essays
Capex Is a Portfolio.
Run It Like One.
The tools of portfolio management — sizing, diversification, downside limits, rebalancing — translate cleanly to capital budgets. Most companies use none of them.
Takes the reader through the annual capex process reimagined as portfolio management: claims as positions, the budget as the book, the mid-year review as rebalancing. Explicitly widens the frame beyond projects to fleets, footprints, and transition bets.
9 min read
Portfolio
The Bad Year Decides the Plan
Base cases are for approval documents. Commitments should be sized by the year everything goes wrong at once.
Coming soonDownside
Bets That Fail Together
Your projects share suppliers, regulators, labor pools, and a commodity price. Your capital plan pretends they don't.
Coming soonCorrelation
The Deferral Illusion: What Skipped Maintenance Really Costs
Deferring maintenance looks free in the year you defer it. The bill arrives compounded, and usually in the worst year.
Coming soonMaintenance
Why 20 Small Projects Beat 2 Mega-Projects
Diversification isn't just for stock portfolios. The same arithmetic decides which capital books survive a bad year.
7 min readDiversification
The Phase 2 Trap: Where $37B Disappears Every Year
The expansion decision is systematically mis-sized — funded on the strength of a first phase that told you very little.
8 min readExpansionAbout these essays
These essays are written by the team that builds the engine, from the same research that calibrates it. We publish the findings openly because the industry's capital discipline problem is bigger than our customer list — and because readers who argue with us make the work better. Data sources and methodology notes are linked at the end of each piece.
The Capvium research teamIf an essay described a problem on your desk
The fastest next step is a working session: your portfolio, our engine, one afternoon.