What we do.
The MCO Foundation conducts independent research into how markets are observed, understood, and decided upon. Our work concerns the methodology of market analysis itself: what we can know, what we can only estimate, and how rigour can be maintained in a field where certainty is rarely available.
The foundation publishes this research and shares it freely. Educational work, written publications, and accessible explanations of analytical methods form the core of our activity.
What we believe about markets.
Markets are not random, but they are not mechanical either. They are systems shaped by the decisions of many people, made under uncertainty, with imperfect information, and frequently in response to one another. What any one observer sees in a market depends substantially on the analytical lens they bring to it.
We hold that no single analytical approach explains markets in their entirety. Structural analysis sees real patterns. Behavioural analysis sees real psychology. Quantitative analysis sees real statistics. Each of these is a partial reading, and each is also incomplete on its own.
What we call the Relational Market Framework is our working answer to this problem: a discipline that treats different analytical layers not as competing claims to truth, but as complementary readings whose relations are themselves a subject of study.
What we are.
We are a charitable company limited by guarantee, incorporated in England and Wales. Our application to the Charity Commission for charity status is pending. We remain pre-operational while that registration is in process.
We are a research and education foundation in the older sense of the word: a body that gathers careful work, organises it methodically, and makes it available to people who want to think more clearly about markets.
What we are not.
A foundation can be many things, and we want to be clear about what this one is not.
We are not a forecasting service. We do not sell market predictions. We have no commercial trading arm, no subscription tier of insights, no premium signal product.
We are not a personal brand. The founder is a researcher who established this work to give long-term form to a public mission; the foundation belongs to its mission, not to him.
We are not a marketing channel. Other organisations exist for that purpose. The foundation does not promote, recommend, or endorse commercial market services, including those operated by anyone connected to the foundation.
We are not in the business of being right about the future. We are in the business of helping people think clearly about the present.
A note on method.
A great deal turns on the analytical lens one chooses. Anyone who has looked carefully at markets knows this: a structural analyst, a macro analyst, and a behavioural analyst, all serious and all rigorous, will frequently see different things in the same data. Not because any of them is mistaken, but because each is asking a different question and looking through a different apparatus.
This is not a problem to be solved by finding the one true method. It is a feature of working with complex systems. The discipline lies in holding the multiple readings with care, taking each layer's findings seriously within its scope, and giving honest account of where the layers agree, where they diverge, and what that divergence might mean.
Our research is organised in this way. The five research domains we have identified are not five different schools of thought, but five layers of one inquiry. Structure in form. Cycles in time. Expectations against reality. Probabilistic reasoning under uncertainty. And the educational work of making this kind of careful thinking available to people who do not work in markets professionally.
An invitation.
The foundation library will publish concept primers and research notes as the work develops. The first concept papers are in preparation, with outlines available to read. More will follow.
If the questions we are asking are interesting to you, we invite you to follow along. If you would like to support the work as it scales, channels for that will open once charity registration is confirmed. If you have research in adjacent areas and would like to discuss it, contact details are below.
The foundation is small now. Its method is its method, not its size. Over time, we expect both to grow.