A small workshop · Est. 2026

Investment tools for thinking less, deciding better.

A growing collection of analytics apps and quiet experiments at the intersection of markets, AI, and good decision-making.

Tools, calculators & experiments.

Each one solves a problem worth solving. Click through to use it — most are free, all are honest.

001 · Pensions Live

IPS Hub

US public-pension Investment Policy Statements, read so you don’t have to. 117 plans, refreshed monthly — what changed, which benchmarks they hold themselves to, and how the universe scores.

002 · Monitoring Live

PensionGraph

Public-pension board packs, read at scale. 148 plans and 5,000+ documents, extracted and summarised into weekly and monthly briefs — who committed to what, which managers won mandates, how funds are performing.

003 · Simulation By request

The Alternate Historian

Counterfactual macro worlds for institutional portfolios. Take a fund through a decade of stagflation, goldilocks or deflation bust — one decision window at a time — then face the reckoning. Simulated throughout; every run reproducible.

004 · Regimes Live

Regimes

Which past looks most like now? Seven market variables, one distance, no regimes named in advance. A live replication of Mulliner, Harvey, Xia, Fang & Van Hemert (2026) — the nearest historical months, the anti-regimes, and whether the ground is shifting.

005 · Macro Live

States

Which macro regime the US is in right now — Contraction, Goldilocks, Overheating or Stagflation — from a walk-forward model on the FRED-MD panel, refreshed each month with a one-month publication lag. Every regime-timing number is shown beside a plain 60/40 benchmark, before and after trading costs, with the look-ahead stripped out and decomposed. An Introduction and a Methodology paper carry the live figures.

006 · Retirement Live

Glidepath Lab

What a private-markets sleeve does to a target-date fund when the premium is a scenario and the redemption cap is real. Monthly plan cash flows against a 5% quarterly gate, income across a grid of premiums, the fee hurdle in one number — with the methodology written down. Engine and API live; the workbench follows.

007 · Markets Live

Briefing

A weekly market and policy briefing built only from primary sources. Every figure traces to its FRED series and vintage; the commentary layer arrives next.

What this is

The Lazy Economist is a workshop for small, sharp tools that help with investment decisions — without the noise.

Most financial software is bloated, opinionated, or designed to sell you something. The apps here aim to be none of those.

Principles

01
Share the intuition. Hide the complexity.
02
A good default beats a hundred settings.
03
If it can't be explained simply, it shouldn't ship.
04
Free where it can be. Honest about when it can't.