Journal.

Daily notes on private equity, commodities, trade finance and M&A, from the operator's side of the table.

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28October 2026Trade finance

Reading the curve: what contango and backwardation tell a trade-finance lender

The shape of a commodity's forward curve decides whether storing a cargo pays, how a borrowing base should be sized and where a hedged deal can still break.

Read the dispatch, 3 min

All dispatches

October 2026

28.10.2026 Reading the curve: what contango and backwardation tell a trade-finance lenderThe shape of a commodity's forward curve decides whether storing a cargo pays, how a borrowing base should be sized and where a hedged deal can still break. Trade finance 3 min
28.10.2026 Cases: what worked, what didn't, and whyBlackstone's Hilton buyout and the Kraft Heinz merger, read side by side: growth and deleveraging against cost alone. Cases 1 min
27.10.2026 Automation and AI: how data pipelines improve process and outcomesClean ingestion, feature engineering and decision automation turn raw telemetry into hard-dollar savings. Two examples at scale. Operations & AI 1 min
26.10.2026 Metrics and modeling: EV/EBITDA, ROIC, cohorts, unit economicsFour measures that separate durable businesses from leaky buckets, and how to read each one. Valuation 1 min
25.10.2026 ETA and search: from thesis to first meetingThe search fund path rewards focused, thesis-driven sourcing and a proprietary outreach engine that runs until live conversations surface. Search funds 1 min
24.10.2026 PE 101: concepts that matterValue creation in buyouts comes from three levers, and higher rates have moved the weight decisively toward operational earnings growth. Private equity 1 min

September 2025

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