What's The Big Deal?

Епизоде

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  Did AI Just Replace the Private Credit Analyst? (GPT-6 vs Fable 5.1) 10.09.2026 24мин

  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 sponsor equity to fund future cash burn and a tiny $4M revolver, a credit memo in form with no actu...
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  AI for Private Equity: Using Claude to Analyze Deals Like a Pro 03.09.2026 50мин

  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, returns analysis, diligence items, with a working LBO model behind it, including the returns attri...
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  Can Claude's AI Agents Build a Better M&A Model than Investment Bankers? 27.08.2026 24мин

  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 to stress test the logic at the end, with Claude supplying the prompts for each handover. Swit...
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  Investing With Claude AI: Screening the S&P 500 to Find Undervalued Stocks 20.08.2026 30мин

  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 ranks every company on earnings yield, book to price, EBITDA to EV, sales to EV and free cash fl...
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  How to Build INSANE Stock Research Dashboards with Claude 13.08.2026 27мин

  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 first quarter as a public company, a business with enough contradictions to push an AI-built dashboard to its...
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  Can Claude Build an Investment-Banking Grade 3-Statement Model in Excel? 06.08.2026 45мин

  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 product segment, having worked out that the Americas, China and rest of world story matters m...
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  Claude for Investment Banking: Building a One-Pager in PowerPoint with AI 30.07.2026 19мин

  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 style company overview for Nvidia. No test runs. No preparation. The result was a genuine split decision. Form...
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  Did Claude Fable 5 Just Solve Private Equity? 23.07.2026 37мин

  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, which is exactly what makes it interesting. In this episode, Debs and Graham dig into what m...
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  Investment Banking: Claude Fable 5 Just One-Shotted a Bulge Bracket-Grade DCF 16.07.2026 46мин

  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 Debs expected. In this episode, Debs and Graham walk through the Fable 5 output in detail. Mid-...
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  Private Equity Faces a 9-Year Backlog. Here's Why. 09.07.2026 14мин

  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 episode, Debs and Graham dig into Bain's private equity report and unpack the structural pressure...
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  Global M&A Just Hit a RECORD $2.8 TRILLION. Here's What's Driving It. 02.07.2026 23мин

  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 surge may not last into 2027. In this episode, Debs and Graham work through Bain's mi...
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  Private Equity vs. Private Credit Explained in 15 Minutes 25.06.2026 14мин

  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 starts with the fundamental distinction: private equity invests in companies that don't trad...
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  EX-BANKERS EXPLAIN: Investment Banking Mistakes To AVOID In Your First Year 18.06.2026 30мин

  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 that earned him an hour-long dressing-down from a VP, and uses it as the entry point to a broader conve...
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  The $1.75 Trillion SpaceX IPO: Everything You Need to Know. 11.06.2026 35мин

  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 rather than through a traditional book-build range, putting all of the price risk onto buyers ...
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  Will the $4 Trillion AI IPO Wave Break the Market? SpaceX, OpenAI & Anthropic 04.06.2026 28мин

  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 valuations being floated, and the structural role of index funds that are obliged to buy these co...
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  Can Claude Replace Investment Bankers? We Graded the Output. 28.05.2026 24мин

  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. Graham walks through DCF fundamentals from first principles, covering future cash flow pr...
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  Claude for Finance: Building a Live Merger Model with AI 21.05.2026 49мин

  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 before opening Claude for Excel and giving it a single instruction: build me a merger model for ...
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  Nvidia Under Pressure: Is the AI Chip Monopoly Finally Cracking? 14.05.2026 37мин

  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 semiconductor industry from first principles, mapping out who does what across the AI chip ecosystem before...
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  How AI Data Centres Are Funded — And What Happens When the Money Stops 07.05.2026 27мин

  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 growth. In this episode, Debs and Graham use the OpenAI revenue miss as a lens to examine how AI in...
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  Private Equity: Leveraged Buyouts Explained (How to Analyze Deals Like a Pro) 30.04.2026 1ч 2мин

  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 LBO framework using an accessible house purchase analogy, explaining how leverage turns a 1...