The Equity-Research Report Deck and the Model Walkthrough

Learning objectives

You can:

1. Write a thesis page that states the claim, quantifies the variant perception as a difference between two sets of drivers, and names the observable that would prove you wrong.
2. Reverse-engineer the market case from a traded price, express it as a driver set, and use it as the starting point of every valuation exhibit in the deck.
3. Build a valuation bridge from price to target one driver at a time, choose between the sequential and the independent construction, and quantify the interaction term that the independent construction leaves unexplained.
4. Build a scenario page carrying three coherent driver sets, their probabilities, their triggers and a probability-weighted value, and compute the reward-to-risk ratio the page implies.
5. Write a risks page in which every risk names its observable, its effect on value in currency per share and the date by which you would know.
6. Choose the exhibit set a research argument needs, identify the three exhibits that are weak by default, and apply the specific repair each one takes.
7. Build a one-page assumption sheet from a three-statement model, classify every input as reported, policy or estimate, and run the three integrity checks before any slide is built.
8. Walk a model live in the output-first order, in nine minutes, with the four predictable questions answered before they are asked.
9. Show sensitivity honestly, choosing among a two-way grid, a tornado and a scenario set, and stating what a trimmed grid removed and why.
10. Source and date every number on every exhibit, classify it as reported, computed, estimated or market, and compute the coverage share the deck currently achieves.

Prerequisites & connections

Builds on. The board deck and the investor pitch in PR5.02, which own the decisions-first structure, the pre-read discipline and the density that a reading artefact can carry. The archetype idea itself, the action-title body page and the appendix contract come from PR5.01. From the chart branch you need PR2.01 for chart-form choice and PR2.03 for the action title and small multiples, since every exhibit here is scored against that grammar. On the finance side, the model whose output this deck presents is built in M3.08 and M3.09, and the reverse-DCF technique that recovers the market case from a price is taught in M3.05.

Feeds forward. PR6.01 takes the walkthrough and teaches the Q&A around it, including the question you cannot answer. PR7.01 is the capstone, where an archetype is chosen under time pressure from an unseen brief, and the research deck is one of the four candidates.

Four neighbours own material that touches this one closely, and the boundaries are drawn on purpose so that none of it is rebuilt here. M10.03 owns the written analyst deliverables: the one-page memo, the full research report and the exhibit-design drill as applied to written work. What is owned here is the deck and the live walkthrough, which are different artefacts with a different failure mode, since a reader of a report cannot interrupt it. M3.08 and M3.09 own model construction, and nothing below teaches you to build a three-statement model or a DCF. The model used in the worked examples is supplied complete, and the skill practised is presenting one and defending it. ES1.03 owns the conduct and disclosure obligations themselves, including the advice perimeter and what separates research from a recommendation to a specific client. The compliance section here covers only where the furniture sits on the page and what it does not promise. PR5.02 owns the investor pitch, so the market-sizing craft and the ask belong there rather than here.

1. What a research deck must carry that a memo does not

A memo is linear. The reader starts at the top, moves down at a pace they control, and the argument is carried by sentences that can qualify each other across paragraphs. If a claim on page two needs the caveat on page three, prose can hold the two together.

A deck gives up all three of those properties. The reader arrives in a room where you are present and can be interrupted, or opens the file alone six weeks later and lands wherever the scroll bar dropped them. Sentences are short and separated by page breaks, so a caveat two pages away is a caveat nobody read. What replaces prose continuity is redundancy of a particular kind: each page states its own claim, shows its own evidence and names its own source.