How this is built

Sources

• SEC EDGAR full-text search and daily filing index (8-K, S-4, 424B-series, DEFM14A, PREM14A, 425, Form D, Form 25).
• PR Newswire and GlobeNewswire wire feeds (headline and excerpt only; never paywalled publisher content).
• We never scrape or store body text from Reuters, Bloomberg, WSJ, FT, or Barron’s. If a fact only appears behind a paywall, it is not in this database.

Advisor credit conventions

• M&A: full credit to every advisor on every side. A $10B deal with two sell-side advisors credits each bank the full $10B. This matches standard street convention.
• ECM/DCM: credit is split equally among bookrunner-role advisors, co-managers excluded. We do not yet parse the actual underwriting allocation table from 424B filings; that would give exact apportionment instead of an equal-split estimate.

Known biases and limitations

• Coverage bias: this system only captures deals with a public filing or wire release. Private middle-market and non-US activity is systematically undercounted.
• Attribution by announced date, not closed date, where available.
• Small sample: the current dataset spans roughly two months of filings (41 assembled deals), not the multi-year history this methodology is designed for. Sector/quarterly trend analysis, market-level regressions, and league-table validation against published LSEG/Dealogic figures all require substantially more historical depth than exists yet, so we do not publish those numbers until they would mean something.
• SIC-based classification: each deal’s coverage group is looked up deterministically from the relevant company’s SEC-registered SIC code, never guessed by a model at query time. This is auditable but can be stale: a company whose business has changed since its SIC code was last updated (e.g. a former check-printing company now in payments) will classify under its old industry.
• Entity resolution: company names are resolved to SEC CIKs deterministically. Acquired/delisted companies are resolved via the filing’s own filer CIK when the standard ticker registry (a live-only snapshot) no longer lists them. Some private or foreign counterparties have no CIK at all and are correctly left unresolved rather than guessed.
• No price or fundamentals data yet: premium calculations and EV/EBITDA multiples are implemented but return nothing, because no market-data or XBRL-fundamentals connector has been built. A blank field here means the data doesn’t exist yet, not that it was forgotten.

Every number is inspectable

Every advisor credit on a deal page links to its source filing and shows the verbatim sentence it was extracted from. If a number looks wrong, the source is one click away, and that is by design.