What's The Big Deal?
Get the view from the inside. Every week, Graham Smith (ex-Ares) and Deborah Taylor (ex-Barclays) take a look at Wall Street’s headline-grabbing deals. From mega-mergers and hostile takeovers to complex private credit transactions, they break down the why, the how, and the who behind the numbers.
Episodes
Investment Banking Valuation Methods Explained (Valuing Apple with Claude)
This week Debs and Graham take on the football field, the valuation summary page that goes into almost every investment banking pitch book. Claude Opus 5.5 built one for Apple, covering trading comps, precedent transactions, a DCF, a DCF with synergies, an LBO analysis and the 52-week trading range, with the supporting analysis behind each bar.The chart raises the question the episode turns on. Ap
Did Claude Just Replace the Equity Research Analyst?
This week Debs gives Claude a job she did for years at Barclays: write an equity research note on a company of its choosing. It picked Chipotle. Its first pass came back neutral with an equal weight rating, so Debs pushed it to take a view. The result is a sell rating, a $28.50 target price on a $33.68 share price and a note titled Guac is Extra.Debs walks through the note the way a research desk
Can Anthropic's Claude Build Its Own $2 Trillion IPO Roadshow Deck?
This week Graham and Debs take on Anthropic's IPO, the offering investors are projecting at around $2 trillion on a reported $100bn raise, with pricing expected before the US midterms. No S-1 yet, so no official financials, but the roadshow is coming, and the pair asked two frontier models to draft the roadshow presentation from public information alone: Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra, same
Did AI Just Replace the Private Credit Analyst? (GPT-6 vs Fable 5.1)
OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra is days old, so Graham and Debs put it straight to work against Claude Fable 5.1 on a real job: write a private credit memo for the same hospital deal Claude analyzed from the equity side last week. Same document, same prompt, live on screen, with Astra still generating when the recording started.The two models read the deal completely differently. Astra proposed $155M of
AI for Private Equity: Using Claude to Analyze Deals Like a Pro
This week Graham and Debs give Claude Fable a first-year private equity associate's job: take a real deal document, digest it, pull out the risks and highlights, write the investment committee memo and build the indicative returns model. The prompt was a few lines. The output is a seven-page IC memo, executive summary, entry valuation, investment thesis, operating cases, sources and uses, ret
Can Claude's AI Agents Build a Better M&A Model than Investment Bankers?
This week Debs and Graham run the numbers on the proposed Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern merger, a deal that would create a $250bn rail network. Debs built a short form merger model for it, and how she built it is the real story.Fable burns through tokens fast, so Debs asked Claude to delegate the build: Sonnet for the data mining and consensus estimates, Fable for planning and structure, Opus
Investing With Claude AI: Screening the S&P 500 to Find Undervalued Stocks
This week Debs and Graham build an investment screen with Claude and run it across the S&P 500. The prompt was two lines: produce a value and momentum screen, pull fundamentals from the SEC API and market data from a free source. Claude chose the factors, built the scoring and generated the dashboard. Debs, who is quick to point out she is not a coder, did the setup in Power Query.The screen r
How to Build INSANE Stock Research Dashboards with Claude
Graham and Deborah build a full stock research dashboard from scratch using Claude, then use it to take apart a company's latest quarterly results in real time. The data comes straight from SEC EDGAR, the build runs off a single prompt and some back-and-forth, and the output is the kind of analysis that used to need an expensive terminal and a team behind it.The test case is SpaceX's fir
Can Claude Build an Investment-Banking Grade 3-Statement Model in Excel?
Graham asked Fable 5 for a five-year three-statement operating model on Lululemon. A few short paragraphs of instruction: where to pull historic results from, where to source forecasts, what structure to use, which levers matter for a retailer with stores, inventory and an active restructuring plan.What came back was more than a set of forecasts. Claude split revenue by geography rather than produ
Claude for Investment Banking: Building a One-Pager in PowerPoint with AI
Graham has a confession: he hates PowerPoint. Always has. The late nights at Lehman Brothers lining up charts pixel by pixel. The IC memos that never end. And when he recently tried using Claude Opus to build slides, his words were blunt: "they looked like cr*p."So this week, he and Debs gave Anthropic's newest model, Fable 5, one sentence and a template. Build an investment banking
Did Claude Fable 5 Just Solve Private Equity?
Stripe and Advent have proposed a $50+ billion take-private acquisition of PayPal. It's a mega deal that doesn't fit neatly into any traditional M&A category. Stripe is the private payments giant. Advent is one of the largest global PE firms. PayPal is a public payments company with $33 billion in revenue. And the combined transaction is arguably too big for a traditional buyout, whi
Investment Banking: Claude Fable 5 Just One-Shotted a Bulge Bracket-Grade DCF
Six weeks ago, Debs and Graham asked Claude Opus to build a DCF.The result got a B-minus from Graham and a C from Debs. Missed calculations, questionable assumptions, no clear reasoning on why it was cutting corners. This week they ran the exact same test — same prompt, same company, no additional guidance — on Anthropic's newest model, Fable 5. The result was a step-change neither Graham or
Private Equity Faces a 9-Year Backlog. Here's Why.
US private equity firms now face a 9-year backlog of unsold portfolio companies at the current pace, according to new PwC and PitchBook analysis. Roughly 13,500 companies sit in PE portfolios as of June 30, with nearly 4,000 held for 6+ years and 1,500 held for 9+ years. Fundraising has collapsed alongside, with only $159.6 billion raised in H1, on track to match 2025's muted total.In this ep
Global M&A Just Hit a RECORD $2.8 TRILLION. Here's What's Driving It.
Global M&A hit a record $2.83 trillion in H1 2026, the highest total since records began, eclipsing the 2021 peak of $2.74 trillion. Deal values in Q2 alone were up 41% year-on-year, deal count up around 10%, mega deals continue to dominate, and small-cap and venture activity is up 200%. But the picture underneath the headline numbers is more complicated, and both think the drivers behind the
Private Equity vs. Private Credit Explained in 15 Minutes
Two of the biggest growth areas in finance over the last decade, but the differences between private equity and private credit are often misunderstood, especially by candidates trying to decide between them. In this episode, Debs sits down with Graham, who spent a decade at Ares Management for a Q&A-style explainer that breaks down what each actually is and how the day-to-day differs.Graham st
EX-BANKERS EXPLAIN: Investment Banking Mistakes To AVOID In Your First Year
It's summer training season. Both Debs and Graham are spending their days running analyst and associate programmes at major firms, which makes this the right moment to step back from the deal-of-the-week format and share the kind of candid advice they wish someone had given them on day one.Graham opens with his own first-year story at Lehman Brothers in 2005, including the pitch book error th
The $1.75 Trillion SpaceX IPO: Everything You Need to Know.
SpaceX begins trading on Friday at a $1.75 trillion valuation, and the deal looks unlike any major IPO that has come before it. In this episode, Debs and Graham go inside the prospectus, break down the unusual structural features Elon Musk has pushed through, and debate whether the valuation can be justified.The mechanics alone are remarkable. The IPO is being priced at a fixed $135 per share rath
Will the $4 Trillion AI IPO Wave Break the Market? SpaceX, OpenAI & Anthropic
Three mega IPOs are heading to market: SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic. Between them they could push the largest tech names to nearly half of the S&P 500, at valuations that have drawn obvious comparisons to the dotcom era. In this episode, Debs and Graham debate whether those comparisons hold, and where they break down.They start with the triggers: extreme index concentration, the scale of the v
Can Claude Replace Investment Bankers? We Graded the Output.
How good is AI at building a DCF? In this episode, Debs and Graham continue their Claude for Excel series, this time prompting the tool to construct a full discounted cash flow valuation for Lululemon from a single instruction. The goal is to test what AI can and cannot do in real valuation workflows, and what that means for analysts working in equity research, investment banking and M&A.Graha
Claude for Finance: Building a Live Merger Model with AI
How good is AI at building investment banking models? In this episode, Debs and Graham put Claude for Excel to the test by prompting it to construct a full merger model from scratch, using GameStop's $56 billion bid for eBay as the live case study, but with the focus squarely on the AI workflow rather than the deal itself.Graham walks through the merger model framework from first principles b
Nvidia Under Pressure: Is the AI Chip Monopoly Finally Cracking?
Every AI product you use runs on semiconductors. And for the last several years, the narrative has been almost entirely about Nvidia. But Q1 2025 results are painting a more nuanced picture and for the first time, the question of whether Nvidia's dominance is structural or temporary feels like a live debate rather than a hypothetical.In this episode, Debs and Graham go inside the semiconducto
How AI Data Centres Are Funded — And What Happens When the Money Stops
OpenAI has missed a revenue target in the run-up to what is expected to be one of the largest IPOs in history. Sam Altman and the company's CFO have been publicly at odds. And behind all of this sits close to $700 billion of committed CapEx across the major hyperscalers, much of it financed through project finance structures that were built on the assumption of hyper-aggressive AI revenue gro
Private Equity: Leveraged Buyouts Explained (How to Analyze Deals Like a Pro)
This week Graham and Debs try something different. Rather than dissecting a single deal, they go back to basics with one of the most important concepts in finance — the leveraged buyout — and build up from first principles using two of the biggest real-world examples in the market right now: the $18B acquisition of Hologic and the $55B acquisition of Electronic Arts.Graham walks through the core L
How Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan & Morgan Stanley Make Billions (Explained)
Q1 2026 delivered one of the strongest quarters on record for the major investment banks and in this episode, Debs and Graham break down exactly what drove it. Starting with the headline numbers at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley - nearly $90 billion in combined revenue, up 12% year on year. They unpack why this quarter was unusual: all three core revenue engines fired simultaneously, s
OpenAI vs. Anthropic Explained: Business Models, Valuations & IPO Breakdown
ChatGPT vs. Claude. Consumer vs. enterprise. Own your infrastructure vs. lease it. On the surface, OpenAI and Anthropic look like the same business. Look closer and the differences are significant and they matter enormously for investors.In this episode of WTBD, Debs and Graham go under the hood of the two most talked-about AI companies in the world, breaking down what their business models actual
Q1 2026: A Record-Breaking M&A Quarter — Inside the Unilever $45BN Deal
Q1 2026 just delivered the most mega-deals in a single quarter, ever!But not every deal in this bumper period is one to celebrate. This week Deborah and Graham break down what's driving the surge in $10BN+ transactions, then go deep on one of the quarter's most talked-about deals: Unilever selling its food business, including Marmite and Hellmann's, to McCormick for $45 billion.On t
SpaceX to File for Biggest IPO of All-Time ($1.75 Trillion Valuation)
Elon Musk's SpaceX is reportedly preparing to file its U.S. IPO prospectus as early as this week, targeting a public listing this June.According to new reports from the Information, advisors now predict the company could try to raise a record-breaking $75 billion, far above the $50 billion previously touted.This would more than double the previous $29 billion record set by Saudi Aramco in 201
Will AI Replace Wall Street Investment Banking Jobs?
Welcome to the fourth episode of the 'What's the Big Deal?' (WTBD) podcast powered by Wall Street Prep.AI is advancing at an exponential pace. Tools like Claude, ChatGPT, CoPilot and Shortcut are fundamentally reshaping workflows and what it means to be an investment banking analyst.But where are we right now? And where are we heading? In this special episode of the podcast Wall Str
The Truth Behind Paramount's $110 Billion Battle for Warner Bros. Discovery (Winners & Losers)
Welcome to the second episode of the 'What's the Big Deal?' (WTBD) podcast powered by Wall Street Prep.In this episode, Wall-Street Experts Deborah Taylor, (former Director at Barclays) and Graham Smith (former Director at Ares) dive deep into Paramount's $110B acquisition of WBD.They discuss why Netflix's $27.75 bid wasn't actually "cheaper" than the Skydan
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