I’m exploring the K-shaped economy as an investment theme. My working view is that households with substantial assets have benefited much more from the economy than households with limited savings and tighter budgets. I want to understand how that changes behavior, where the effects travel next, and which businesses sit along those transmission pathways.

The purpose is to broaden my thinking before choosing investments. Do not start with a list of stocks or build a story around familiar tickers. Start with the economics: who is affected, what constraints change, what people do differently, and how those decisions affect other people and businesses.

Focus primarily on the US economy over the next one to three years. Explore the pressured side of the K in depth, then include useful contrasts from the wealthier side. Use current evidence and record the research cutoff date. Treat my view as a hypothesis to investigate, rather than a conclusion you need to defend.

I want to work with you in stages. You help me map a wide set of possibilities, I choose the pathways I find persuasive, and then we research those pathways before deciding which companies best express them.

First, propose how we should investigate this. Explain how you would define the theme, organize the economic map, gather evidence and narrow the research. Identify the data or access you would need and the important gaps in the starting brief. Do not begin the full research until we have agreed on the plan.

The first research pass should create a broad, industry-first map. For each meaningful pathway, explain the starting pressure, the behavioral response and the second- and third-order consequences. Follow where spending shifts, disappears or gets delayed. Look for substitution, bottlenecks, changing bargaining power and demand that moves between different parts of a value chain.

Go beyond the obvious consumer brands. Ask who supplies the alternative, who owns the scarce capacity, who pays for the solution and who captures the economics. Include businesses facing pressure as well as businesses gaining demand. Explore competing responses to the same problem, and combine overlapping ideas instead of padding the map.

Give each pathway a short name and a clear explanation in ordinary language. Show the causal sequence, the industries involved, the assumptions holding it together, and the evidence we would need to test it. Keep company names out of this first pass. Save a readable interactive HTML map and a structured research table in the project folder so we can inspect and revisit the work.

Then pause and let me select the pathways to research. I may reject a path, change its logic or ask you to explore another branch. My selection should determine where you spend the research effort.

For the selected pathways, turn each important causal link into a research question. Gather the relevant economic data, industry evidence and company disclosures. Use primary sources for material claims wherever possible, use available MCP connections when they help retrieve the underlying data, and clearly identify any secondary sources you rely on. Record source links, publication dates and the periods the data measures.

Look for evidence against the idea as deliberately as evidence supporting it. Separate a change in consumer behavior from an increase in industry sales, and separate sales growth from profit capture. Check whether costs, competition, capacity, financing or another part of the business offsets the apparent benefit. Tell me which links hold up, which need more work and which should be rejected. Then pause for my review again.

Only after that review should you map company exposures. Compare different ways to express the same pathway rather than returning the first obvious stock. Check the relevant business segment, its importance to the company, geography, other exposures, current ticker and listing status. A supplier, distributor or property owner may express the idea differently from the company selling the final product.

Finish with a concise comparison of the most relevant expressions for each selected pathway, the remaining research questions and a short results menu I can read without digging through every working file. Keep the detailed evidence and calculations alongside the map. Do not make a ticker the centerpiece of a weak economic argument.

Before executing, show me your proposed plan and ask the questions that would materially change the research. Focus on the thesis, time horizon, geography, source access and what I mean by a useful investment expression. Do not ask me to repeat information already in this brief.

Let’s resolve those questions first. Once I approve the plan, complete the broad mapping pass and stop for my pathway selection. We’ll then research the selected paths, review the evidence together, and choose the company expressions last.