About this reference
Who publishes it, how it is put together, what it deliberately does not do.
Who
This site is published by Wall Street Wiki. A reference published by the wallstreet.wiki network. Every figure is stated as a formula and recomputed from it, every convention names the authority that sets it, and corrections are versioned and dated.
Why it exists
Deal math is usually taught as narrative and then applied as a spreadsheet, and the gap between the two is where most errors live. This reference states the arithmetic first. Every worked example is internally consistent and ties to the bridge it claims to explain. Notation is uniform throughout: EV is enterprise value, E is equity value, D is the gross debt balance, C is cash, ND is net debt (D - C), EBITDA is earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation, x_entry and x_exit are the entry and exit EV/EBITDA multiples, t is the holding period in years, r is a discount rate or WACC, g is a growth rate, tau is the marginal tax rate, IRR is the internal rate of return, MOIC is multiple on invested capital, NI is net income, S is the fully diluted share count, P is price per share, and EPS is NI/S. Subscript 0 denotes entry or the pre-deal state and subscript t denotes exit or the pro forma state. Nothing here is a market-terms survey or a multiples benchmark: no leverage level, premium, or multiple appearing below is presented as a measured market statistic. Where a convention exists it is named as a convention. Where a rule comes from a statute or accounting standard it is cited by section.
How it is built
Every page here is generated from a single reviewed data file. That has consequences worth stating: the content is a data edit rather than a code change, every page has a JSON twin carrying the same facts without markup, and the review date attached to a page comes from the data file rather than from the build clock - so rebuilding without changing anything does not make the content look fresher than it is.
| Property | This site |
|---|---|
| Licence | CC BY 4.0 - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
| Content reviewed | 2026-08-27 |
| Machine-readable corpus | /index.json and /llms-full.txt |
| Change feed | /changes.json - poll this instead of re-crawling |
| Network | 9 sibling references, indexed at wallstreet.wiki |
| Third-party requests | None. No fonts, no CDN, no analytics, no trackers on any page. |
| Contact | [email protected], or the form. Corrections get answered first. |
What is deliberately not here
No investment performance figures. Not because there are none, but because an unaudited return published on a commercial site is the specific thing securities counsel warns about, and the antifraud rules reach a publisher whether or not they are a registered adviser. If figures ever appear here they will have been reviewed first.
No recommendations. Nothing on this site says what to buy, when, or in what size. It states how the arithmetic works. That line is deliberate: impersonal, generally circulated financial writing is publishing, and personalised advice is something else with a different regulatory regime attached.
No market levels presented as fact. Every number in a worked example is an input chosen so the arithmetic can be checked, not an observation of where anything trades. Structures and formulas are durable; levels are not, and a stale level stated confidently is worse than no level at all.
Corrections
If a formula or a worked figure here is wrong, that is worth more to fix than anything else on the site, and the fastest route is the contact form. Corrections are recorded in the change feed with a date, so what changed and when is auditable rather than silently overwritten.