The plain-English version.

This is personal commentary, not advice.

Everything on bpleon.com — essays, research notes, reports, models, calculators, charts, and ticker data — is my personal opinion and analysis. It is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It is not investment advice, tax advice, legal advice, or any other kind of professional advice.

I am not your financial advisor.

Reading this site does not create an advisory relationship between us. I do not know your financial situation, tax bracket, time horizon, or risk tolerance. Any decision you make about your money is your own. Talk to a licensed professional before acting on anything you read here.

I may hold positions.

I may at any time own — long or short, directly or indirectly — any of the securities, sectors, currencies, or commodities discussed on this site. I try to disclose specific positions when they're material to a piece, but I do not pre-announce trades and I am under no obligation to update this site when my positions change.

Data is not guaranteed.

Live market data on this site is provided by third parties (CoinGecko, Frankfurter, Yahoo Finance, and others). Quotes may be delayed, incomplete, or wrong. Models, templates, and calculators are simplified educational tools — the math is correct but the inputs are yours, and there are always assumptions baked in that may not apply to your situation.

Past performance, future performance, all the usual.

Markets do not care about my opinions or yours. Past results — mine, anyone's, any model's — do not predict future results. Investments can lose value, including the entire amount invested. Trade and invest accordingly.

Screening, ranking, and scorecard tools.

Several tools on this site — the take-private precedents page, the reverse-LBO calculator, the returns waterfall, the distribution waterfall, the LBO calculator's sector chips, the cap-table waterfall, the QofE quick-check — score or rank specific companies on illustrative dimensions like leverage capacity, sponsor IRR, cyclical positioning, or earnings quality. None of these outputs are research, recommendations, target prices, projections, or transaction signals. They are methodology demonstrations that run the math on inputs you (or I) supply. Reasonable people using the same tools and different inputs will reach different conclusions. Treat every scored, ranked, or implied-price output as a worked example of how the calculation runs — not a call on the underlying security.

Take-private analysis is not a transaction signal.

When I publish reverse-LBO or take-private math on a specific public name — an LBO scorecard for Micron at an illustrative entry multiple, or a take-private case study on Western Digital — the work is meant to ground a question I find interesting: what would a sponsor pay for this, and why? It is not a prediction that a transaction is coming and it is not a call on the stock. Sponsors do not consult me. I have no non-public information about any actual deal pipeline. If you see a name discussed as a take-private candidate on this site, that is my analytical exercise. It is not news.

What I publish, and what I don't.

Names that appear in my published analysis — Micron, Western Digital, Intel, the integrated oils, the AI infrastructure complex — are names I'm comfortable writing about publicly. I keep a small private list of names I study but do not publish on, typically because I hold a position, am considering one, or expect to be restricted on the name in a future role. That list is not disclosed by name; the rule is simpler. If you don't see a name treated explicitly on this site, assume I don't intend to comment on it. Do not read silence as signal in either direction.

If you spot an error, tell me.

Email [email protected] and I'll fix it.