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.
What's The Big Deal?
Latest Episodes
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...