This is The Conviction Play. Before any company, a question: where does capital have to go? Not where it might do well, but where it has no choice.

We keep a map of the answer. Seven destinations, and twenty-two themes beneath them. Each is a shift large enough and slow enough to still be running in ten years, which is the only kind worth underwriting against. It is revised as the evidence changes. Forces are added, renamed and merged, and nothing on it is fixed.

Power. Electricity has to be generated, moved, stored and controlled in far greater volume and with far less tolerance for failure than the system was built for. Infrastructure. Physical infrastructure gets hardened, duplicated and redesigned to survive things it was not specified for, extreme weather, deliberate attack, and resource scarcity. Supply chains. Where things are made, and what they are made from, is being rebuilt for security of supply rather than lowest landed cost. Automation. Work moves from people to software and machines. Defence. States rebuild the capacity to defend themselves and to operate without depending on anyone else, across land, cyber and orbit. Health and wellbeing. Populations live longer with more years of managed illness, and the care has to be delivered by a workforce that is not growing. Experience. As incomes rise and populations age into more leisure hours, a growing share of spending goes to how time is filled rather than to goods.

One question comes before all of them, and it is the one everybody asks first. Where is climate? Every one of these forces acts on the same planet, and the physical state of it, the climate, the heat, the water, the air and the materials, is a condition on all of them rather than an eighth force beside them. That is why it has no spoke of its own. These forces sort capital by where it lands, and the environment is a reason money moves rather than a place it arrives. A spoke named climate would cross every other spoke and locate nothing. In three of them the physical fact does most of the work rather than some of it, and the map says which.

The map implies a programme: find the exceptional companies inside each force, one force at a time. Some of them may not have one. A force that turns up no company we can call exceptional is an answer, not a failure to deliver, and saying that in advance is cheaper than explaining it later.

The whole map is on the site, with every theme written out and the companies we have covered under each one. It is free, with no email address and no paywall, at the conviction play dot com.

Each force has an episode of its own, and the companies we judge exceptional have theirs. Everything we have made is collected at the conviction play dot com, under Listen.

A note before we finish. This episode is narrated by a synthetic voice, not by the author. This is a map of where capital is going. It is not a view on any share price, not a valuation, and not a recommendation to buy or sell anything. A force can be real and every company exposed to it still be a poor investment. The Conviction Play publishes general commentary for information only. It is not investment advice and it is not a personal recommendation. Capital is at risk, and the value of investments can fall as well as rise. The map is revised as the evidence changes, and this episode reflects it as it stood on the day it was made.

That was the map, from The Conviction Play. Thank you for listening.