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
25 episodes
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. <...
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.Fab...
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 cho...
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...
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 fo...
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...
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 th...
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 wee...
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 a...
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...
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 si...
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 advi...
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 El...
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, De...
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. ...
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 ...
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 wh...
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 committ...
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...
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...
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...
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, the...
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 ...
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 wha...
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 de...