Why I Built VSTM Analytics
It started as one page for my wife’s family. It became something else entirely.
My wife Rosmary is Venezuelan. We own property there. Her entire family — parents, siblings, cousins, aunts — still lives there. For years, every conversation with her family ended the same way: confusion, anxiety, and contradictory information pulled from WhatsApp groups, partisan news sites, and well-meaning relatives who had heard something from someone who had heard something else.
The noise was relentless. And in the middle of it, real decisions had to be made — about money, about travel, about whether to stay or leave, about what was actually happening to the country they loved.
I could not find a single source that cut through it. So I built one.
VSTM Analytics began as the Venezuela Stability and Transition Monitor — a single page I put together for my wife and her family to filter the noise, separate verified intelligence from rumor, and give them something solid to stand on when the emotional roller coaster got to be too much. It was a personal project. A few sourced news items, a summary, a clear bottom line.
Then something happened. The more rigorously I sourced it, the more useful it became. The more I tracked developments over time, the more patterns emerged. A single-page summary became a scored methodology. A scored methodology became a proprietary framework — the Core Stability Metric, the Transition Pressure Index, the Travel Viability Assessment. What started as intelligence for one family became a product that could serve anyone with exposure to Venezuela.
That is who VSTM Analytics is for. Investors with Venezuela-linked positions who need more than headlines. Attorneys advising Venezuelan clients who need verified sourcing. Travelers and business operators who need to know whether conditions on the ground match what official advisories say. NGO staff, academics, diplomats, and policymakers who need analytical context that wire services do not provide. And Venezuelan diaspora families — like mine — who need the noise filtered so they can give good advice to the people they love.
VSTM Analytics publishes seven products. Venezuela Watch is free, every day, in English and in Spanish as Venezuela al Día. The Daily Alert covers every significant development. The Full Briefing — sixteen pages of scored, sourced, analytical intelligence — publishes every Monday and Thursday. The Weekly Signal gives you the week’s movements in one visual page. The Monthly Intelligence Review tracks trajectory across the month. And the Annual Report, launching January 2027, will be the definitive longitudinal record of Venezuela’s first year under the Rodríguez government.
The methodology is transparent. The sourcing is tiered. The scores move only when evidence justifies movement. And every issue is written to be technical enough to mean something and clear enough for anyone to read.
If Venezuela matters to you — for any reason — this is the publication Rosmary and I wish had existed before I built it.
John Young
VSTM Analytics
Venezuela Watch is free. Subscribe below to receive the daily summary in English and Spanish. Upgrade to Venezuela Intelligence ($19/month) for the full analytical suite.