Methodology

The trust infrastructure around the AI.

Every competitor will use AI. The advantage isn't the model — it's what the model has to pass before its output reaches you. This page documents the four pillars of that infrastructure: deterministic kill gates, public calibration tracking, audit-grade source provenance, and an architecturally-enforced Chinese Wall between the research engine and broker economics.

Kill gates

We reject deals that don't fit. The reasoning is logged.

Every IC memo passes through a deterministic kill-gate evaluation before composition begins. If the requested deal type is structurally implausible — an LBO on a $300B GSIB, a growth-equity round on a sub-$5M ARR business — the pipeline halts and surfaces the rationale to the requester. We refuse to produce the memo rather than write a polished argument for a bad fit.

Calibration tracking

Memos carry a public accuracy track record.

Every prediction we make — IRR, MOIC, exit multiple, growth band — is recorded with a resolution horizon and graded against eventual reality. Drift is published in our calibration retrospectives. We are willing to be wrong in public, because a track record you can't see has no information value.

Source provenance

Every claim links to its primary source.

EDGAR filings, S-1s, named news outlets, GDELT entries, USPTO patents, public hiring feeds — every assertion in a memo is hyperlinked to the source it came from. The memo's Sources tab is a structured, exportable index. No black-box reasoning, no "our analysts believe" without a citation.

Chinese Wall

The research engine cannot see broker economics.

Research and scoring outputs are computed deterministically from their documented inputs. They have no read access to which IOIs have been submitted, which deals are routed to our broker partner, or which lines on our P&L the next dollar comes from. This isolation is enforced in code, not just policy — see "How the wall is enforced" below.

The calibration loop

Every IC memo we ship records its predictions — IRR, MOIC, exit multiple, revenue growth band, margin trajectory — with a resolution horizon. When the horizon arrives, an independent grader pulls the realized data and compares. The result feeds two things: the public calibration retrospectives (so customers can see how our predictions in their sectors have actually played out) and the prompt-revision proposals that ship through our internal adaptation pipeline.

Some predictions resolve fast: revenue growth at the next reporting cycle, margin expansion at the next 10-Q, financing rounds within two quarters. Some resolve slowly: IRR resolves only at exit. We surface interim signals where available rather than waiting for terminal resolution, and we're explicit about which is which.

The point is not to be right every time. The point is to know how right we are, sector by sector, and to publish that.

How the Chinese Wall is enforced

For a customer base whose entire job is sniffing out misaligned incentives, "trust us" is not enough. The wall is enforced in three layers:

1. Architectural isolation

The research engine and the IOI workflow live in separate code paths with separate data stores and separate read permissions. The research job has no credentials to read the IOI tables and no network path to the broker integration. A constitutional code-level prohibition prevents IOI economics from feeding back into research or scoring outputs under any circumstance, and is enforced statically by a checker that fails the build on any forbidden import — a breach in either direction, research reading broker state or the broker portal reading research, stops the deploy. The technical contract — module boundaries and the enforcement layers — is written up in docs/CHINESE_WALL.md, which we provide on request under NDA.

2. Broker structure

TrancheBook is a financial publisher and research platform — not a broker-dealer. Indications of interest are routed to our registered broker-dealer partner (Rainmaker Securities) on a flat-fee basis. We are paid for routing, not for deal outcome — so our research has nothing to gain from boosting a company we expect to transact.

3. Public commitment

The prohibition is published here — in plain language, on the methodology page. If the wall ever weakens, this page must weaken with it. Customers reading along will notice. That public-commitment cost is the point.

Read the calibration retrospectives

Methodology is words. Calibration retrospectives are the receipts. We publish them monthly on the blog.

Read the blog Request access