Over the past decade, the sixty or so days a year on which a major geopolitical or macro shock landed carried close to sixty per cent of the FTSE 100’s equity premium. Fewer than one company in five has built a dedicated capability to see those days coming.
That gap is not an information problem. Directors are not short of headlines, data feeds or scenario decks. They are short of someone who will read the map, take a position, sign it, and still be there when it is tested.
We decline conflicts rather than manage them, we do not lobby, and every judgment we publish carries a date and a name. Everything else follows from those three rules.
Where we work
How we price it→
The chokepoint premium
Pricing the straits, canals and cables the global economy quietly depends on.
Somewhere in every portfolio there is a strait. It rarely appears on a risk register, but it is there: in the freight assumptions of a retailer, the feedstock of a chemicals business, the latency of a trading desk that has never thought about the seabed its packets cross.
Read the note→Most risk registers price dependence at zero.
Not because the danger is unknown, but because the wrong thing is being counted. A register records how much passes through a route. The loss comes from what it costs to send it another way, on the day the route shuts. That number is usually several times larger, and it is knowable now.
Dependence is not measured by transit volume. It is measured by the cost of the best alternative on the day the route closes, and by the unpredictability that arrives with it — a covenant written against an average has no defence against a variance. Priced that way, exposures filed under logistics, other turn out to be among the largest lines on the register.
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The cost of fixing a dependence rises at exactly the moment you need it fixed.
Alternative routes, berths, second sources and repair capacity can all be reserved today at prices that assume nothing will happen. They stop being available in the week that something does. And a dependence of any size is fixed by a programme rather than a memo, which is the other reason to start before it is urgent.
How we work: three rules, and everything else follows.
Conflicts are declined, not managed.
A large firm manages a conflict with an internal wall. We decline the second mandate. Where two parties want opposing answers to the same question, only one of them can have ours.
We do not lobby.
We read governments; we do not work them. A firm that sells access cannot also sell an honest assessment of the people it needs access to.
Every judgment signed and dated.
A view with a date on it can be checked against events. So every note separates what the evidence supports from what cuts against it and what nobody has observed at all, and states the condition under which we would change our mind. We do not issue a single probability, because one number hides exactly that distinction and a committee handed one plans as though the third category did not exist. Where we are wrong we say so under the next number.
How the work is bought
Four forms, in the order clients usually need them.
A retained relationship with the board or the investment committee. One senior adviser, reachable, who knows the business before the crisis arrives rather than after it.
Each political dependence priced at the cost of its best alternative on the day it closes. Most registers understate this by a multiple, and the review says by how much.
Three futures, each with a trigger observable in public data within a week. A position that needs one of them to be true is a wager, and should be sized as one.
Where the answer is that the organisation itself has to change, we deliver the change rather than describe it: operating model, supply chain, regulatory remediation, market entry and exit. A firm that writes an excellent assessment and hands it to somebody else has done the easier half.
Who we are useful to
And, as often matters more, who we are not.
Global footprint, no in-house geopolitical function, and a board newly obliged to show oversight. Cannot justify a standing team; can justify a retained adviser.
One market, one strait, one supplier, one licence. Must disclose a material risk without triggering the very consequence being disclosed. Needs judgment, not more data.
Buying or holding assets whose value rests on assumptions about the map. Wants the exposure priced before the committee votes, and one name accountable for the view.
Anyone wanting access to a minister, a favourable regulatory outcome, or a report that agrees with a decision already taken. We decline that work, and say why.
The record.
Every note is numbered, dated and signed, so it can be checked against what happened next. A new one appears each week.
Why this firm exists.
Because the analysis a board can buy is rarely the analysis a board can act on, and almost none of it is signed by anyone.
Geopolitical risk has become a governance obligation. It arrived on the register faster than any method for managing it, so directors are now accountable for a class of exposure their organisation cannot yet price. The market answered with more information. That was never the shortage.
A large firm sells a practice: a methodology, a team, a deck. This work needs a person who has read the file, will commit to a view, and can be reached on the day it matters. That cannot be delegated, which is why we do not intend to scale it. The firm is small; the record behind it is not. Two decades of enterprise change delivered at scale across banking, defence, pharmaceuticals and central government, and several hundred million pounds of validated benefit. Most geopolitical advice stops at the point where somebody has to change something, because the firm giving it has never had to. Ours does not stop there.
Most analysis is unsigned, undated and therefore unfalsifiable, which makes it comfortable to produce and useless to act on. A judgment with a date on it can be checked against what happened, and every note we publish carries the condition that would prove it wrong. That discipline is the product.
Narvik was an ordinary northern port until the map was contested. Then it was worth a battle.
Nothing about the harbour changed. What changed was the iron ore moving through it and the alternatives available to the people who needed it. Its value was always there; it was simply unpriced until the day it bound.
That is the whole method. Every business holds a dependence of the same kind, carried at zero on the register because it has never yet bound. We find it, price it, and say what to do about it while doing something is still cheap.
Tell us the decision you are facing.
We will tell you whether we are the right firm for it. If we are not, we will usually say who is.
Thank you. Your message is with the firm.
We answer every enquiry, usually within two working days. If the matter will not wait, write directly to enquiries@narvikstrategy.com.
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