When trade becomes a weapon, someone owns the gate.

Most analysis asks who gets hurt. This asks who gets paid.

Globalization did not flatten power. It concentrated it, and since 2010 governments have learned to operate the concentration points deliberately.

A remarkable share of the world's payments, advanced chips and seaborne cargo passes through a handful of jurisdictions, standards and firms. Those are chokepoints, and they are now instruments of statecraft: dollar clearing and secondary sanctions, export controls that reach across borders through the products they touch, maritime insurance that decides which cargo sails and at what price.

Every use of one makes the world less efficient on purpose. Fabs get duplicated instead of built once where yields are best. Crude sails around a continent. Compliance officers trace ownership through six layers of shells before releasing a payment that used to clear automatically. That cost is real, and it falls hardest on firms that assumed cheap single-sourced inputs and cannot pass the increase forward — which is most of what a broad index holds.

A much smaller group collects it. Not the chipmaker, the shipper of goods or the manufacturer relocating a plant; those absorb the cost of redundancy. The beneficiaries own the gate itself: the sole vendor of a required tool, the only railway across a border, the database every compliance officer must query, the fleet that earns more when voyages lengthen, the assets central banks buy when they stop trusting each other's paper.

The three tests a holding has to pass

1. MandatoryThe customer cannot decline to buy it and remain in business or in compliance.
2. Structurally protectedThe moat is physics, statute or network effect — not brand, price or marketing.
3. Friction-positiveRevenue rises when the world gets harder, rather than falling.

Most apparent beneficiaries of deglobalization fail one of the three. A domestic manufacturer gaining share from an import restriction usually fails the third, because its own input costs rose with the same friction that lifted its revenue.

Seven pillars, twenty-eight assets.

Select any pillar to filter the screener below it.

The whole argument, at a glance.

Why it matters, the five steps from a policy decision to a position, the three tests a holding has to pass, all seven pillars, and what the package contains — on one page you can read in two minutes or hand to someone else.

Click to expand Download the overview (PDF)

Free to read, keep and pass on. It names the same three holdings as the free excerpt and none of the other twenty-five, so it can be forwarded without giving the roster away.

The central caution in this research now has a date on it.

Using a chokepoint teaches the target to build around it. Leverage decays, and a tollbooth is a wonderful asset right up until someone finishes the bypass.

That sentence is in the dossier, in the free excerpt, and in the exit test attached to every pillar. It is not a hedge added after the fact; it is the reason this is a framework rather than a list of tickers.

It is also no longer hypothetical. In December 2024 China prohibited exports of gallium, germanium, antimony and superhard materials to the United States. On 9 November 2025 its Ministry of Commerce suspended that prohibition, moving the materials back under licensing. The suspension runs to 27 November 2026. The ban on military end users was never lifted. China refines roughly 99 per cent of the world's gallium, about 83 per cent of its germanium and close to half of mined antimony.

That is the same instrument pointed the other way — a gate the West does not own, aimed at Western defence electronics and infrared optics, on a clock that runs out in November.

Two things follow, and the second matters more than the first.

The first is that the thesis holds. Friction is not receding, the gates are still being worked, and the parties that own them are still collecting.

The second is a limit worth stating plainly, because you should know it before you buy rather than after. This research maps tollbooths on gates the West operates or benefits from. It does not hold a position in the mineral extraction and chemical refining capacity that an adversary controls. That is a different pillar, and it is not in here. What is in here is the discipline that tells you when a gate you own is losing its leverage, the early signal for each one, and the exit rule attached to it — which is the part of the framework that survives a regime where both sides have gates.

The screening matrix.

Twenty-eight holdings across the seven pillars. Three are named here — the same three profiled in the free teaser — so you can see exactly what a row contains. The other twenty-five are the research.

What you are buying is the framework — the gates, the mechanisms, the allocation structure and the tests that tell you when a gate is losing leverage. The screening figures are the worked example beneath it, shipped as one consistent baseline from 18–20 September 2024 so the original twenty-five holdings stay directly comparable, and you can repopulate the workbook yourself in a few minutes — the dossier appendix covers how, in both Google Sheets and Excel. There is no feed behind this and nothing to keep subscribed to; the file is yours and you refresh it when you choose.

A structure, not a stock list.

Core-satellite, fifty-thirty-twenty, with a written review cadence and drift rule for each sleeve. Enter an amount to see how the sleeves size.

One package. One zip.

Delivered the moment you pay. Inside it: the dossier covering all twenty-eight holdings, the three-tab tracker and allocation workbook, the implementation and rebalancing guide, the two-page executive summary, the interactive allocation tool, which opens in any browser and runs entirely offline from the folder you unzip it into, and a ten-slide deck with a one-page infographic. A read-me names each file and suggests an order. Nothing to install, no account to keep, and no feed to stay subscribed to. The files are yours.

Built for people who read carefully and trust little.

One package, one price, one click.

No subscription, no tiers to compare, no upsell. You buy the research once and it is yours.

Read six pages first, at no cost.

The Geopolitical Friction Tax: why interdependence became a weapon.

The conceptual core of the thesis, the shift from just-in-time to just-in-case as an investable regime change, and three asset profiles — ASML, Canadian Pacific Kansas City and Frontline — with the gate and the mechanism described in full.

What you are buying, plainly.

Licensed, not sold. The full agreement is published at a permanent version URL and is readable before you pay.

What each part is covered by

The free six-page teaser is free to read, keep and pass on. It carries no licence conditions and is not covered by the agreement below.

The paid package — the dossier, the workbook, the implementation guide, the executive summary and the allocation tool — is licensed under End User Licence Agreement v1.0. Buying it grants a licence to use those files; it does not transfer ownership of them.

The short version

The agreement itself

End User Licence Agreement v1.0 — the permanent version URL. Version 1.0 never changes; any later version is published at its own URL and does not replace this one for a licence already granted.
Current licence — the stable pointer, which always resolves to whichever version is current.

Licensor: PIGENAI LLC, Kansas City, MO, United States. Governed by the laws of the State of Missouri, with exclusive jurisdiction in Jackson County, Missouri. Support and refund contact: lindsay.hiebert@gmail.com. The agreement is linked at checkout with an unticked box, and the terms are emailed with your receipt.