Corporate Financial Modeling for Leveraged Finance
A live, applied course. It begins with a simple operating model and builds to a quarterly model where a company's operating drivers meet its capital structure — its covenants, its flexibility, and the optionality embedded in the credit agreement. The result is one framework for assessing an investment from both sides of the table: as a credit investor and as a private-equity investor.
September and November 2026 cohorts · Live on Zoom · Places limited
The true value of a capital structure.
Most credit analysis stops at credit strength. This framework goes further: it sets what could happen to the business against what the capital structure permits in response, and values the difference. A leveraged credit is, in effect, a bundle of options the lender writes to the borrower; the spread is the residual once those options are priced. Because the options the lender writes are the same ones an equity owner holds, a single model serves both the credit investor and the private-equity investor.
Built from the company's own drivers and unit economics — by segment and geography — with capex and asset-by-asset D&A schedules, working capital, and cash taxes versus tax provisions. The full range of outcomes the business can produce.
Set by the credit agreement — raise debt, pay dividends, invest, divest. What the covenants permit in each scenario.
Priced with standard option methods, then used to inform the structure — quantum, maturity, price and covenants — from either side of the deal.
Headroom, downside protection, breach risk and recovery — the metrics behind extending, holding or pricing credit.
Returns, value creation and the cost of flexibility — the metrics behind a private-equity investment.
What you'll be able to do
Build a driver-based operating model
Start from the business as it is and turn its underlying drivers into a model — annual, then quarterly.
Reconfigure the capital structure
Model changes to debt and equity — an LBO, an acquisition, a divestment, a refinancing, or a new minority shareholder.
Read leveraged-finance deals
Understand leveraged loans and high-yield bonds, and read the credit agreements behind them.
Model covenants as a system
Model the full set of undertakings — debt, dividends, investments, disposals — not a single ratio.
Run scenario and sensitivity analysis
Test how the business, and the structure, respond across base, upside and downside cases.
Value and optimize the structure
Price the embedded optionality and optimize the structure — quantum, maturity, price and covenants — from both a credit and an equity perspective.
Originate and pitch opportunities
Source deals proactively across leveraged loans and high yield — add-ons, refinancings, recapitalizations, divestments and take-privates — then build and deliver the pitch.
Twelve hours, end to end
Four live three-hour sessions. We build one model together, step by step, on a realistic, true-to-life company — then turn to sourcing and pitching opportunities. You receive the working file at each stage.
Every provision is an option.
The work is in turning a 200-page credit agreement into instruments that can be valued. Each undertaking is mapped to its option equivalent and priced. No prior options background is required; the course develops the intuition from first principles.
What the covenant bundle is worth.
Each provision is priced as an option and summed — read from the borrower's side. A negative is optionality the lender has written away: flexibility that lowers the borrower's effective cost of debt. A positive is a protection the lender keeps. The total is the net reduction the structure delivers to the borrower.
For the borrower, the structure has bought cheap flexibility — roughly 85 bps of optionality embedded in the spread against a modelled cost of 116. For the lender, the mirror image: the bond is rich, and it is underpaid for what it has written.
Which terms are worth the fight.
Rank every covenant feature by η — the economic value it creates over what it costs the lender — and the negotiating order falls out: pay up at the top, concede at the bottom. That ranking is the frontier.
Who it's for
Built for people who need to build, defend or read credit models for a living — and for those working toward it.
Comfortable working in Excel. A basic grasp of the three financial statements helps, but we build everything from the ground up.
Sharpen the modeling you do every day to a deal-ready standard.
Pressure-test sponsor models and assess covenant mechanics with precision.
Build skills that usually take years on the desk to acquire.
Understand your business as your lenders and sponsors do.
Federico Etchelecu
Twenty years in investment banking and close to a hundred closed deals across European leveraged finance — working with leveraged corporates and private-equity sponsors alike, from mid-cap to large-cap.
The material reflects how models are built, covenants negotiated and credit underwritten on live transactions — condensed into twelve hours.
Author of the forthcoming book, The LevFin Book →Two cohorts, one price
All four sessions for a single fee. Choose the September or the November cohort; both run in the same live slot, scheduled to suit participants in North America and Europe.