How the work is done
The three layers, the rating system on the Monitor, and the sourcing standards behind every claim. Published so you can judge the work, not just trust it.
01 The three layers
Every subject moves through three artefacts, each with a different job.
The Briefing is the surface. It names one structural pattern behind a market move in plain language, in under ten minutes of reading. It is free, because the pattern should be available to anyone running an exposed business.
The Capability Brief is the source. It does the work the Briefing rests on: the peer set, the revenue-shape model, the financial-period read, and the explicit chain of reasoning. It is for members, because it is the part that takes weeks to produce.
Items to Monitor is the accountability. Each Brief ends with testable claims, dated where possible, and those claims live on the public Monitor. This is what separates a read from an opinion: we say in advance what would prove us wrong.
02 The rating system
Every watch item carries one of four statuses, re-rated each quarter. A status is never carried by colour alone: each pairs a label with a shape.
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Live | Actively expected to move this quarter. We're watching closely for a near-term catalyst. |
| Pending | Awaiting a specific dated event or disclosure: an earnings call, an AGM, a spec publication. |
| Standing | Open and valid, but on a longer horizon with no near-term catalyst. |
| Resolved | Confirmed or broken. We rate it either way and close it; being wrong in public is the point. |
A claim only moves to Resolved when the evidence is unambiguous. If a claim becomes untestable (the company is taken private, the event is cancelled) we mark it withdrawn rather than quietly deleting it.
03 Sourcing standards
We work from primary sources first: filings, transcripts, regulatory texts, and verifiable announcements. Where we use estimates, we label them as estimates. Where a figure is reconstructed from disclosures, we show the working in the Capability Brief.
We do not publish numbers we cannot trace, and we do not launder a guess as a fact by rounding it. A Capability Brief's source list is part of the product, not an appendix.
04 Corrections
When we get something wrong, we correct it in place and note what changed and when. Material corrections are flagged at the top of the affected Brief. The Monitor's quarterly re-rating is itself a standing correction mechanism: it is where a thesis that didn't hold gets marked as such.
05 Independence
Altered Principles BV takes no positions in the companies it writes about and runs no sponsored coverage. There is no fixed publishing cadence, which removes the incentive to manufacture a pattern to fill a slot. The only thing we are selling is the membership, and the membership is only worth buying if the reads hold up. That alignment is the whole business model.
Questions about the method? Write to the editor.