Deck: An introduction to the only desk on Wall Street that profits from the obituaries.

Most of finance is obsessed with what's rising. The next hot stock. The next unicorn. The next thing that goes up and to the right forever.

I am not most of finance.

I watch the other direction. The companies that were once untouchable — the household names, the category killers, the "too big to fail" darlings — and the slow, quiet machinery that takes them apart. Because here is the thing nobody on the business-news circuit wants to say out loud: collapse is not random. It is not bad luck. It is a process. It has stages. It leaves a trail.

By the time a famous company files for bankruptcy, the ending was written years earlier — in a debt covenant, in a financing structure, in a single arrogant decision that everyone applauded at the time. The headline is the last page. I am interested in the whole book.

This newsletter is the written companion to that work. Here you will find the patterns, the mechanics, and the warning signs that repeat across every collapse, decade after decade — dressed up in new logos, but fundamentally the same story.

I don't celebrate failure. I study it. Because the investor who understands how things die is the one who is never surprised when they do.

Welcome to the food chain.

— The Vulture

For educational purposes only. Not financial advice.