{ "method_id": "speg-index-scarcity-v1.0.0", "schema_id": "speg-index-profile-v1.0.0", "product_name": "sPEG Index — durable scarcity selection with valuation context", "status": "locked_research_method", "definition": "The sPEG Index identifies listed companies with evidence-supported capacity to retain economic benefits from constrained alternatives over a three-to-five-year research horizon.", "measurement_boundary": "Membership is a business-quality judgment. Valuation is a separate question. The index is not a weighted or investable return benchmark and publishes no performance series, portfolio weights, buy/sell calls, or return claims.", "unit_of_assessment": "An identified capability inside a stated business perimeter, followed by an independently gated company-level materiality decision.", "horizon": "three_to_five_years", "dimensions": [ { "id": "constraint", "code": "C", "label": "Constraint", "question": "How constrained are feasible competitive alternatives?", "anchors": [ "Equivalent capacity or capability is broadly available.", "A short-lived shortage has a straightforward expansion response.", "Meaningful barriers exist, but qualified alternatives or expansion are credible.", "Few feasible alternatives exist; replication requires substantial technical, ecosystem, or qualification work.", "The capability is unique in the defined application, with no demonstrated equivalent and documented multi-stage replication barriers." ] }, { "id": "substitution_resistance", "code": "S", "label": "Substitution resistance", "question": "What must the customer change to replace or bypass the capability?", "anchors": [ "Switching is routine.", "Switching creates modest friction.", "Migration costs are material, but practical alternatives exist.", "Redesign, qualification, or workflow rebuilding imposes substantial operational burden.", "Replacement requires fundamental architecture or process change with demonstrated performance or execution obstacles." ] }, { "id": "economic_capture", "code": "E", "label": "Economic capture", "question": "Does the company retain economic benefit attributable to the capability?", "anchors": [ "The benefit is captured elsewhere or demand persists alongside losses.", "Demand or revenue exists without demonstrated retained benefit.", "Economics are positive, but scarcity attribution is weak or mainly temporary.", "Retained operating economics appear across more than one period and are plausibly linked to the capability.", "Retention survives adverse conditions or renewals with strong bargaining-power evidence and limited leakage." ] }, { "id": "persistence", "code": "P", "label": "Persistence", "question": "How long can the mechanism persist through specified competitive responses?", "anchors": [ "The mechanism has broken.", "Credible erosion is expected within roughly one year.", "Protection is plausible for one to three years, but the three-to-five-year case is unresolved.", "Three-to-five-year persistence is credible through specified competitive responses.", "Multi-generation evidence supports a path beyond five years and tests specific erosion mechanisms." ] }, { "id": "cost_of_defense", "code": "D", "label": "Cost of defending scarcity", "question": "What economics remain after the spending required to defend the capability?", "anchors": [ "Defense destroys retained economics or cannot be funded.", "Necessary spending consumes most of the benefit.", "The spending burden is substantial or uncertain; positive retention is plausible but sensitive.", "Material benefit remains after reviewed R&D, operating, and capital demands.", "Retention remains resilient through an adverse period after full defense spending." ] } ], "score_policy": { "name": "Scarcity Durability Score", "abbreviation": "SDS", "range": [ 0, 20 ], "aggregation": "integer_sum_when_all_five_dimensions_are_known", "unknown_policy": "Any unknown dimension makes the total null. Unknown is never zero or imputed.", "meaning": "Ordinal editorial measurement; not a probability, percentile, price input, or return forecast.", "display": "Always show the five-component vector with the total. Do not fabricate ranks inside ties." }, "admission_gates": { "dimension_floors": { "constraint": 3, "substitution_resistance": 3, "economic_capture": 3, "persistence": 3, "cost_of_defense": 2 }, "materiality": "adequate", "minimum_decisive_confidence": "Moderate", "source_packet": "required", "structural_review_max_age_days": 90, "material_event_status": "no_unresolved_material_eligibility_event", "total_note": "The floors imply a minimum total of 14; the total is not an independent admission gate." }, "research_decisions": [ "include", "watchlist", "insufficient_evidence", "exclude" ], "membership_states": [ "member", "under_review", "removed" ], "membership_null_policy": "Null means the profile is a candidate or watchlist record that has never been admitted. It must not be relabeled removed merely because it appears in a released research cohort.", "confidence": { "levels": [ "High", "Moderate", "Low", "Unassessable" ], "overall_rule": "The minimum confidence among admission-critical dimensions; never average confidence and never interpret it as probability." }, "minimum_admission_packet": [ "Current reported financials with a prior-period comparator", "Structural capability evidence", "One external-origin customer, supplier, competitor, or technical source", "Explicit economic-capture argument", "Defense-cost review", "Company-perimeter rationale", "At least one credible counter-hypothesis" ], "materiality_policy": { "quantitative_route": "The capability perimeter represents at least 50% of trailing revenue.", "integrated_route": "The capability is demonstrably central across the main business, with a written attribution rationale and no unsupported percentage.", "unknown_or_immaterial": "Watchlist or insufficient evidence; never multiply a segment score by revenue weight." }, "valuation_separation": { "peg": "Conventional PEG may be shown only from a matched, current, positive FY1–FY4 EPS path and verified security basis.", "economic_speg": "Economic sPEG requires a separately qualified paired economic model.", "prohibition": "SDS must not change PEG, the economic multiplier, or economic sPEG. Missing multiplier is never replaced with 1." }, "freshness": { "full_review": "quarterly", "structural_review_max_age_days": 90, "event_review_target_trading_sessions": 5, "unresolved_event_limit_trading_sessions": 20, "valuation_price_max_exchange_sessions": 5, "valuation_estimate_max_age_days": 30 }, "release_policy": "Quarterly immutable snapshots plus interim releases for decisive changes. Information cutoff, publication time, and effective membership time remain separate. Draft include recommendations never mutate membership. A released cohort may contain non-member candidate records with null membership; member, under_review, and removed are reserved for the membership ledger.", "content_hash_policy": "Released snapshots publish a SHA-256 digest of a canonical key-sorted JSON representation of the complete API release with root and profile content_hash fields set to null. CI must reproduce the digest before deployment.", "limitations": [ "The five dimensions are correlated and have not been statistically validated as independent factors.", "The first cohort is purposive and cannot establish sector neutrality, diversification, or predictive validity.", "Thresholds are conservative governance choices, not cutoffs optimized against returns.", "Cross-sector comparison is structured by common anchors but remains mechanism-sensitive and judgment-based." ] }