The deal-maker's path
Behind every press release announcing a deal is a model and a story. This journey is the deal-maker's working toolkit: valuation foundations, the DCF, the LBO mechanics that drive private-equity returns, the M&A frameworks that justify the synergy claims, and the special-situations playbook for spin-offs, restructurings, and other set pieces. It's the language M&A bankers and PE investors actually speak.
Your path
Work through the courses in order, or skip to whichever fits where you are. Every course is free and saves your progress locally.
- 1Understanding ValuationBeginner
Learn how to tell if a stock is expensive or cheap using the metrics professionals use.
- 2DCF Valuation in PracticeIntermediate
Build a complete discounted cash flow model from scratch. Learn to project cash flows, select discount rates, and stress-test your assumptions.
- 3Leveraged Buyout AnalysisAdvanced
Understand how private equity firms use debt to amplify returns. Learn LBO mechanics, returns math, and how to think about a company through a financial sponsor's lens.
- 4M&A AnalysisAdvanced
Master the full M&A lifecycle: strategic rationale, deal structure and payment forms, synergy valuation, due diligence and purchase agreements, hostile takeover tactics and defenses, merger arbitrage, post-merger integration, spin-offs and divestitures, and the regulatory and antitrust framework governing transactions.
- 5Practitioner Toolkit: From Concept to ThesisIntermediate
Turn the concepts you have learned into the outputs serious investors actually produce. Build a falsifiable thesis, sharpen a differentiated view, name what you don't yet know, and size a position to the asymmetry — not the conviction.
- 6Special Situations: Where Inefficiency HidesAdvanced
Most of the market is efficient most of the time. Special situations are the corners where it stops being so — spin-offs where index funds are forced to sell, capital structures where bonds and equity disagree about the same firm's risk, short campaigns where the borrow market itself becomes part of the thesis. This path teaches the discipline of finding mispricings that arise from structure, not from sentiment, and of sizing trades that can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.