Essays
After Montaigne. Exploratory writing on philosophy, math, aesthetics, and the rest.
- Finding Austin neighborhoods where homeowners actually move I built a pipeline to rank every Austin-metro subdivision by how often its residents actually sell and leave. Not builders flipping new product, but real homeowner churn. 6,300 subdivisions, two CAD rolls, 33,000 MLS sales, and a Census median age cross-map.
- Who is actually buying Austin real estate right now A follow-up to the M&A tracker digging into the 17 Austin real estate deals from the first year of ingestion. The standout pattern is three institutional sponsors entering UT-adjacent student housing in three consecutive months. Office is bifurcated between trophy and private. The single most underrated print is a 180-acre Bastrop land buy by EdgeConneX, which is data center capital pricing the ERCOT load-growth thesis into raw land.
- Office-to-residential conversion does not pencil in Austin CBD I built a public-data screener of 25 Class B/C office buildings in Austin's CBD to see which ones would convert to residential. The honest finding: zero of them pencil at current rents and 350 per sf hard cost. The breakeven rent is 6.52 per sf per month against a current comp set near 3.00.
- Austin and Texas housing, 20 year history and 5 year forecast A LASSO model on 20 years of Austin housing data, three rate-path scenarios out to 2031, and what each one means for homebuyers, small investors, and institutional allocators.
- Tracking Austin M&A from free sources I built a free-data Austin M&A tracker because I wanted to cold-email boutique investment banks with something more useful than my resume. 43 deals, $9B disclosed, what the data shows, and where it falls short.
- A Powerwall on ERCOT, four years in Four years of ERCOT day-ahead prices, a Powerwall-class battery, two dispatch strategies. Perfect-foresight optimization beats a sort-the-prices heuristic by 3 to 7 percent. The surprise is how small that gap is, and what it implies about where the real money lives.
- The calibration tax Why most "edges" in sports models evaporate at the closing line, and what to spend your effort on instead.
- Why I'm writing here A short note on why this site exists and what I plan to do with it.