What's The Big Deal?

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...

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 th...

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...

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 t...

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 ra...

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...

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. Gr...

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...

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 semiconduc...

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 gr...

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...

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,...

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 a...

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. O...

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 2...

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 S...

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 Skyd...