10 lessons
Dividends: The Four Dates That Matter
Buy the day before the ex-date and you get the dividend. Buy on it and you don't, and the stock price already knows.
M&A From Handshake to Close
The press release is the easy part. The next 9 months: diligence, financing, regulators, and a thousand ways to die.
Why Profitable Companies Die
Profit is an opinion; cash is a fact. The timing gap between paying suppliers and collecting from customers kills more firms than losses do.
An LBO Machine: Buying a Company With Its Own Cash Flows
A private equity firm buys a company mostly with borrowed money, then uses the company’s own profits to repay the loan. By the time they sell, the debt is gone and the equity has quietly multiplied.
Share Buybacks: the Mechanics and the EPS Illusion
A company spends a billion in cash, its earnings per share jumps 8%, and the headlines cheer. But the business earned not one extra pound. Here is the arithmetic the press release leaves out.
Issuing a Corporate Bond: Board Approval to Bookbuild to Listing
A company decides to borrow £500m from strangers. Six weeks later it is done, priced in a single afternoon by an order book that opens at 8am and closes by lunch.
Credit Ratings: How Moody's Decides, and What a Downgrade Triggers
A committee of analysts votes on one letter, Baa3 or Ba1, and that single notch can force pension funds to dump a company’s bonds overnight and lift its borrowing cost by hundreds of millions.
The Bankruptcy Waterfall: Who Gets Paid First
When a company runs out of money, there is never enough to go around. A single rule decides who is made whole and who gets pennies, and shareholders are almost always last.
Earnings Season: From Internal Close to 8-K to the Conference Call
The 30-second headline "Apple beats by 4 cents" rests on three weeks of frantic accounting, a legally-timed press release, and a script lawyers vetted line by line. Here is the machine behind the number.
Stock-Based Compensation: Vesting, Dilution, and What RSUs Really Cost
Your offer says "£100k in RSUs". You will not see a penny of it for a year, the tax bill lands before you can sell, and every grant the company hands out quietly shrinks the slice of the pie you already own.