Published articles
Methodology, frameworks and sector commentary. Updated when there is something worth saying.
-
Equity risk premium: historical, implied, survey
Institutional models quote an equity risk premium from three sources: long-run realised returns, the premium implied by today's prices, and what practitioners say they use. They answer three different questions. This piece walks through choosing one and disclosing the assumption inside it.
-
Version control for financial models: what git buys you
Most finance teams call a shared drive with timestamped filenames version control. Regulators do not. SR 11-7 and SS1/23 require that model changes be logged and auditable. Git makes that achievable. This piece is honest about where it helps in Excel-heavy work, and where it does not.
-
Lease-adjusted profitability in real estate
IFRS 16 rebuilt the tenant's income statement and left the landlord's almost untouched. Seven years on, the practical question is how to read the two sides back into one coverage view. This piece walks the lease-adjusted EBITDA bridge and the NOI-to-FFO frame an analyst needs.
-
Sensitivity analysis is not scenario analysis
Sensitivity analysis and scenario analysis answer different questions. Conflating them in an IC pack is a category error, not a presentation choice. This note sharpens the distinction, names the techniques, and gives the committee reader four diagnostic questions to put to the modeller.
-
Constructing a country-risk premium from first principles
Three approaches dominate institutional country-risk premium construction: the Damodaran sovereign-spread build-up, the CDS-implied route, and the relative-volatility hybrid. Each silently encodes a different assumption. This piece names them and sets out what an IC paper should disclose.
-
Real estate viability appraisals: what has changed since 2024
The inputs that drive a UK viability appraisal have moved materially over the past eighteen months. A short audit of where the standard model is now out of step with the market.
-
IRR revisited: where it misleads investment committees
Internal rate of return is the most widely cited single metric in private capital. It is also the metric most likely to flatter a transaction. A short note on where it breaks and what to read alongside it.
-
A note on terminal value in pre-revenue technology businesses: the case against the perpetuity
Terminal value in a pre-revenue technology model is almost always the largest single number in the valuation. The standard Gordon growth construction is rarely the right way to produce it.
-
A note on weighted-average cost of capital for sovereign wealth and cross-border public-fund deployments
A single-rate WACC obscures the components a cross-border committee needs to see. We set out a layered structure with sovereign-rate base, jurisdiction premium, currency overlay and repatriation-tax drag, each sourced separately.
-
Discount rates revisited: physical climate exposure and what the conventional adjustment hides
Lifting the discount rate by a notional figure penalises the mean and is silent on the tail. The committee needs the probability of a multi-year shortfall, not a smoother exponential decay. Model the exposure on the cash flow.
-
A note on working capital in subscription-hardware businesses: the contribution-margin view
SaaS templates underweight inventory and supplier-terms drag; hardware templates miss the recurring software-margin uplift. We argue for treating the combined revenue line as a single contribution-margin structure, supported by an explicit working-capital module.
-
Layered scenario architecture: why single-variable sensitivity tables mislead committees
Tornado charts vary one input at a time. Real-world variables co-move: commodities and currencies, rates and refinancing. We argue for layered, internally coherent scenario sets that committees can interrogate as worldviews rather than parameter tables.
Commission analysis on a specific question
Insights articles describe how we think. Engagements are how we work. We are willing to write privately on a question that matters to you.