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Hosted by Wall Street Prep · 🇺🇸 US · EN-US · 22 episodes
Established thought leaders with verified media credentials.
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.
Wall Street Prep hosts What's The Big Deal?, a business show with 22 episodes published.
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
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 lever
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
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. Th
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
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
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 epis
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
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
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.
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 instr
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
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 qu
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 billio
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 principl
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, JPMorga
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 enormou
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 $2 trillion private credit industry is facing its first real stress test as record redemption requests collide with the asset class’s inherent illiquidity. This tension is raising urgent questions about disclosure tr
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 coul
Sam Altman
AI Visionary and Billionaire Innovator · Tools for Humanity
1 appearance on this show
Graham Smith
City Council Member & Incoming Mayor, City of Mountain Brook, AL · City of Mountain Brook, AL
4 appearances on this show
Elon Musk
President Elon Musk · Department of Government Efficiency
1 appearance on this show
Deborah Taylor
Wall Street Prep
1 appearance on this show
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What's The Big Deal? is hosted by Wall Street Prep. The show is categorised under business (investing) and has published 22 episodes.
What's The Big Deal? has published 22 episodes.
What's The Big Deal? regularly covers business, investing. It sits in the business category, with a investing focus.
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Episodes of What's The Big Deal? average 33 minutes. a focused format where a clear narrative arc and tight preparation matter most.
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