Published work
Writing
Source-led analysis, professional judgment, and lessons from building applied-AI systems.
5 pieces
Markets & Deals
Source-led analysis of companies, transactions, and market structure.The Wheel: getting paid at both ends of a trade
The Wheel adds a put premium to a planned purchase and a call premium to a planned sale. How the cycle works, when it fits, and where the risk remains.
What is HKEX's Integrated Fund Platform?
HKEX's Integrated Fund Platform has been under construction since 2023. Two of its three planned layers are live. What it fixes, who has joined it, and what is still missing.
What is SSCC's Financial Data Exchange Platform?
HKEX's IFP uses a network operated by Shenzhen Securities Communications. It turns out to be one recent use of a much broader financial messaging utility that began in 2003.
KKR isn't buying Integer cheap. It's buying what public markets couldn't underwrite
Integer Holdings makes the components inside pacemakers and catheters for Medtronic and Boston Scientific. A guidance cut and an activist campaign crushed its stock before KKR agreed to buy it for $5.7 billion.
Kuwait leased out its pipelines for $16 billion. Here's what that actually means
Blackstone, KKR and Brookfield just bought into Kuwait's oil pipeline network without buying control of it. The structure explains why the deal happened now, and why it's a weaker sovereignty story than the headlines imply.
2 pieces
The Practice
Judgment, ethics, and structure drawn from corporate-finance and banking work.Playing the rules, not breaking them
A listed company used two common-law jurisdictions and a public holiday to buy itself breathing room its creditors did not want to give. After a decade in the industry, I am no longer sure it was the worst actor in the story.
Structure for the dispute, not only the closing
A deal should still make sense when obligations are tested and the people reading the documents were not in the room.
1 piece
Learning & Building
What studying and building applied-AI systems is teaching me.Why I went back to university
I had built useful things with AI assistance, but useful output was not the same as understanding the system underneath it.