Smart Augment. About. September 2026.
The method, and what we do not claim
The method
Three statements · the type wall
An agency mortgage desk runs one cycle a month, and most of it is clerical. The files land. Someone downloads them, cuts the same screen as last month, reruns a model on a default rate path, and types the result into a memo the committee will take apart on Thursday. Nine tenths of the hours go on the first four steps. The judgment lives in the fifth. Smart Augment moves the hours to where the judgment is.
The agencies publish loan-level disclosure files at month end for every pool they guarantee. We ingest those files overnight, normalise them into one schema, and record the file, the row and the timestamp for every figure we keep. In a sample month that is 9,240 pools. The subscriber's screen runs next: balance, geography, credit score, servicer, seasoning, whatever the desk cuts by hand today, saved and versioned, with every change logged. In the sample month the screen leaves 1,180. Prepayment is then modelled on the survivors against the subscriber's own rate paths rather than a vendor default. CPR is how fast borrowers prepay, annualised, and in the sample month 146 pools run under the scenarios the committee actually argues about. Each survivor is valued: spread against the generic, and payup, which is what a hand picked pool earns over the generic price. Eighteen carry a case worth writing. Four get a memo. Counts illustrate one month and are not a guarantee.
What lands on the desk by the second business day, counted from the moment the agency posts the file, is those four memos and everything behind them: the screen definition, the model run, six prints of history, four comparables, and a paragraph under the heading What would break it. A memo that cannot name the rate move that makes its own payup wrong has not finished its argument, and a committee finds the gap in about a minute.
What we do not claim
Six rows · the markers stay empty
We do not give investment advice.
Nothing on this site or in any report tells you what to do with a security. Every output is research about how a pool has behaved and how it might behave under inputs you can see.
We do not manage money.
No mandate, no fund, no account. The subscriber's own investment professionals decide; we publish what the files say.
We do not custody assets and we do not place orders.
There is no order ticket anywhere in the product, and there never will be.
Our figures come from official agency disclosures and public market data. Nothing else.
We license no market data terminal, no vendor prepayment model and no vendor analytics, and no page on this site shows or imitates their output. If a number is on the page, its file and its row are behind it.
Our models are estimates.
A prepayment model is a structured opinion about borrowers who have not decided yet. We show the inputs, the scenario and the version so you can disagree with a step rather than a black box.
We publish no track record, no customer names and no founding story.
The brand is new. There is nothing to cite, so nothing is cited. A history on this page would be a claim, and this page makes only claims we can source.
How the price is set
A research seat on a market data terminal is reported at roughly $25,000 a year. Platform is $12,000. The rest of the ladder follows from that anchor: Desk is $200 a user a month for the archive and the builder, and Research is $0 for two gated reports a month, the daily and weekly macro, and the rate and housing dashboard. Every price sits on the pricing page, in the cart and at checkout at the same weight. None sits behind a form, and no one calls you.
The provenance principle
Every figure on the site, in the product and in a memo has a trail back to the disclosure row that produced it: the agency file, the row, the ingestion time, the model version and the scenario. That is what the run stamp on this page means. Where a figure is a sample rather than a live output, the page says so in the same type size as the figure.
The desk photograph
One sheet, one rule, 04:12 ET. The disclosure file has landed and the screen is already running. Sample figures throughout.
What would break it
Three things, in order of weight. If the agencies stopped publishing loan-level files, or delayed them by weeks, the cycle would have nothing to run on. Disclosure has widened rather than narrowed over the past decade, but it is the dependency and you should know it. If a desk's edge lives in the rate path rather than the screen, our value shrinks to the clerical hours, which are still most of the hours. And if the reported terminal seat comes down toward $12,000, the price argument goes with it. We would rather you weighed those three before you paid than after.
The agencies and the files.
A desk whose edge is the rate path.
The reported seat price.