Equity research report format

Not everything fits on a page. A full deep-dive write-up, an initiation report, a capstone thesis package (M10.01–M10.02). These run longer, and the temptation is to write them as a chronological narrative of your research: here is the history, then the industry, then the model, then, forty pages later, the conclusion. That structure is a comprehension disaster for exactly the Pyramid reason: you make the reader carry forty pages of unranked facts before you tell them what any of it was for. The professional structure is the inverted pyramid, borrowed from journalism and disciplined by Minto: most important first, then progressively more detail, so a reader can stop at any depth and still have gotten the most valuable thing they had time for. The PM who reads only the first page has your full conclusion and its key support; the analyst who reads all forty has the whole audit trail; both are served by the same document because the value is front-loaded.

What makes an executive summary stand alone?

Two devices make the inverted pyramid work. The first is an executive summary that stands completely alone. This is the hardest and most important page in the report, and the test is absolute: a reader who reads only the executive summary and nothing else must come away with your recommendation, your variant perception, your key support, your valuation range, and your main risk, enough to act. It is not a teaser ("this report will explore…"); it is not a table of contents in prose ("Section 3 covers the moat"); it is a self-contained miniature of the entire argument, itself built as SCQA + pyramid. A useful construction test: if you deleted the other thirty-nine pages, would the executive summary still be a complete, defensible investment case? If not, it is not an executive summary; it is an introduction. The one-page memo is essentially a stand-alone executive summary, which is why mastering the one-pager is the prerequisite for the long report.

What order should the sections follow?

The second device is a section order that descends the pyramid, each section headed by a claim (not a topic) and self-contained enough to be read on its own. A robust default order, each section a box in the pyramid:

1. Executive summary: the whole argument in miniature; stands alone (above).
2. The business: what it does, how it makes money, the real profit engine; the reader must understand the machine before any judgment of it lands.
3. The moat / why it's a good business: the competitive-advantage case, proven in ROIC persistence and share stability, not asserted in adjectives.
4. The financials: the ten-year history and quality-of-earnings read that either confirm or undercut the moat claim; this is where your Phase 1–2 work shows.
5. Valuation: intrinsic (DCF/owner earnings), relative (comps), and expectations (reverse DCF), presented as a range with the drivers named.
6. Risks / the bear case: the steelman, honestly stated, converted to monitorable break-variables; a report with no genuine bear case is a fan letter and a reader knows it.
7. The thesis / recommendation: the variant perception restated with the full weight of the report behind it, plus sell criteria.

Order 2→7 mirrors the five spine questions and the deep-dive method exactly, which is why the report almost writes itself once the analysis is done: you are walking the same tree you built. But the executive summary comes first and is written last, because it is the summary of everything below it, and a reader must be able to stop after it. The inverted pyramid is Minto's single-answer-first rule applied at the scale of a forty-page document: the conclusion at the top, the same structure fractally repeated in every section, and the detail available to anyone who wants to descend but required of no one.