Following on from #34 and #35, I have been thinking about how we might structure deals at a high-level and in the abstract.
My preference is to get publishers publishing and to place most of the responsibility for analysis primarily with data users. I suspect this is the way to go because financial performance metrics are going to be very difficult to standardise around without intensive methodological work on business processes/data recording. This methodological work, in turn. is blocked by a lack of standardised data. We can provide the latter with the spec but not the former.
With that in mind, my current abstract idea for a Deal is an array of DealComponents.
A DealComponent is one of:
A CostBenefit. This is something that should provide value to the investee organisation and MAY create a cost to the investing organisation. An example would be the brokerage services described in #35. (It needs a better name, sorry.)
An Agreement. This is some financial agreement between an investee and investing organisations. It covers the kinds of deal finance objects we have covered elsewhere in the issue tracker.
An Adjustment. This is an alteration to an existing Agreement in the same deal, for example a payment holiday. It may result in the creation of a new Agreement, e.g., if part of a loan is turned into equity.
In theory, then, an analyst could calculate the return on an investment using their preferred methodology. This would either be:
On the terms stated in the original agreements;
On the terms stated in the original agreements, accounting for any published adjustments.
The main drawback for this method that I see at the moment is that the agreements in, e.g., community share issues are often very vague, due to the uncertainty surrounding their business plans/need for capital. These might require an Adjustment that made the terms concrete as and when repayable shares started being repaid (or not).
Following on from #34 and #35, I have been thinking about how we might structure deals at a high-level and in the abstract.
My preference is to get publishers publishing and to place most of the responsibility for analysis primarily with data users. I suspect this is the way to go because financial performance metrics are going to be very difficult to standardise around without intensive methodological work on business processes/data recording. This methodological work, in turn. is blocked by a lack of standardised data. We can provide the latter with the spec but not the former.
With that in mind, my current abstract idea for a
Dealis an array ofDealComponents.A
DealComponentis one of:CostBenefit. This is something that should provide value to the investee organisation and MAY create a cost to the investing organisation. An example would be the brokerage services described in #35. (It needs a better name, sorry.)Agreement. This is some financial agreement between an investee and investing organisations. It covers the kinds of deal finance objects we have covered elsewhere in the issue tracker.Adjustment. This is an alteration to an existingAgreementin the same deal, for example a payment holiday. It may result in the creation of a newAgreement, e.g., if part of a loan is turned into equity.In theory, then, an analyst could calculate the return on an investment using their preferred methodology. This would either be:
The main drawback for this method that I see at the moment is that the agreements in, e.g., community share issues are often very vague, due to the uncertainty surrounding their business plans/need for capital. These might require an
Adjustmentthat made the terms concrete as and when repayable shares started being repaid (or not).