About
Plain Markets explains how markets work, one narrow question at a time.
Most explanations of markets fail in one of two ways. Either they assume you already know the vocabulary, or they simplify until the exceptions disappear. Both leave you unable to tell whether what you just read applies to the situation in front of you.
This site tries a third thing. Every article answers a single question, shows the mechanism behind the answer, and then says where the relationship stops holding. That last part is the one most explanations leave out, and it is the part that matters when the usual pattern fails.
Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell anything. The site exists to make market behaviour legible, not to tell anyone what to do with it.
How these are written
Every number in an article comes from a dated, attributed source, and those sources are listed with the article. Where a number is used only to show arithmetic, it is labelled as such. Drafts are AI-assisted. Every source is checked by hand before publishing.
The full process, including the correction policy, is on the methodology page.
Market engineering
Engineering means taking a structure apart to see what holds it up and what makes it fail. Markets have structures too — priced, leveraged, and hedged — and they fail in ways that are often predictable once you know where to look.
This site takes those structures apart one at a time.
Who writes this
Ryan Kim runs the Financial Research Lab at ARIDRI, INC. and serves as chair of the advisory committee at Seoul Frontier Investment.
His work is technology valuation, pre-IPO assessment for companies listing under Korea's special listing provisions, and startup advisory. In practice that means spending a lot of time on one question: how does money decide what something is worth, and what happens to that judgment when conditions change.
He also chairs the Korea Youth Future Association, which works with young people in Korea on the practical side of building a life — financial independence most of all. That work is where this site started. The questions people actually ask are rarely about which asset to buy. They are about why the thing they were told would happen did not happen.
Contact
Email: contact at mnllab dot com