Case studies are the Institute’s answer to “does the library actually work on a live situation, or just on tidy hypotheticals?” Each one takes a real public event — an S-1 filing, a board fight, a corporate restructuring, a regulatory shift — and walks the math, the structure, and the moves a practitioner with the Institute library on his shelf would make. Every case study ships with a Library Crosswalk that names which chapters taught which move.
The case study and the crosswalk are free. The full work package is the buy.
The reader is the analyst. The Institute supplies the tools.
“In 2006 I met one of the founding partners of what’s now one of the most respected boutique investment banks in the country — when the firm was just a few people in a room. This is the practitioner-shelf version of the bet they were making.”
SpaceX filed its Form S-1 on May 20, 2026 targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation. The Institute published a practitioner reading of the filing within 24 hours — a 16-page memo, a 2-page NOL Addendum, a 17-slide IC deck, a NOL-adjusted Excel model, and a Library Crosswalk naming every move back to the chapter that taught it. Base case lands at $1.55T. The NOL shield buried in the tax footnote is walked through the math and present-valued at $4-5B — the kind of footnote reading the library teaches.
A practitioner read of Lyft at $13.90: $1.12B TTM FCF vs. $5.28B market cap. Buybacks reduced FY2025 share count ~18M despite the $322M GAAP SBC charge. EV/FCF ~4.1x. Probability-weighted central estimate $25.83 / share. The Founder's View walks through why the AV bull narrative — Lyft owns the fleet — likely inverts the value thesis into a Hertz / Avis fleet-operator multiple. Three engines (DCF + comps + SOTP + NOL), every number traced to a 10-K page.
A practitioner read of CLF at $11.23 at the cycle trough. Trough FY2025 Adj. EBITDA of $37M makes EV/EBITDA mathematically meaningless — the real floor comes from ~$25-35B replacement value for the integrated BF/BOF + iron ore + DRI footprint vs. $14.8B EV, plus the $4.827B federal NOL ($1.10/sh PV), plus strategic-buyer + asset-sales math, plus through-cycle EBITDA of $1.5-2.0B (not $37M). The Founder's View: CLF reads less like a steel producer at trough EBITDA and more like an irreplaceable strategic asset on the US reshoring trade.
A practitioner read of FI at $57.13 after the 68% drawdown. $4.4B FY2025 FCF at 93% conversion. FY2025 buybacks: 32.2M shares for $5.6B — roughly 18% of market cap returned in one year. Trading 6.9x FCF / 9.7x PE. ID26 guidance projects 2027-2029 cumulative FCF $13.5B+, majority to buybacks. Triangulated 3-lens valuation: Bear $76 / Base $120 / Bull $161 vs. $57.13 close — ~110% to Base. The Founder's View: the drawdown looks like Clover-failure + organic-growth panic, both likely overblown if multi-decade switching costs hold.
When the next big public situation lands — a board fight, a tax-law shift, a large family-office transition, an M&A break-up — the Institute will walk it the same way. Each case study earns its way onto this page by being a real situation that exercises the library on something a reader could not have predicted.
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A case study is a live, public situation walked through with the practitioner library on the shelf. The S-1 is real. The board fight is real. The deal break-up is real. The math is anchored to the document. Every figure is tagged: disclosed (with the page reference), estimated (with the reasoning), methodology (with the framework named).
A case study is not a buy/sell rating, a price target, an allocation recommendation, or an opinion of fairness. The Institute does not publish ratings. It publishes the math, the assumptions, the source tags, and the framework — laid out the way a senior practitioner would lay them out across the table. The reader walks his own allocation. The framework travels.
The Library Crosswalk is what makes each case study a teaching artifact, not just a one-off analysis. Every analytical move is named, cited to the specific Institute chapter that taught it, and made portable to the next situation that lands on the reader’s desk. Boutique bankers, fractional CFOs, family-office principals, post-exit operators, and senior advisors use the Crosswalk to navigate the library to whatever they need to learn next.
If you find the work compelling, the five guides that supply the methods are at baratelliinstitute.com/guides. Each one is priced for a single working practitioner. The library is built to compose into a single shelf the practitioner carries from one engagement to the next.