8 practitioner guides by Julian R. Sterling, best read first at the top. Each one is built on a single worked case, and every figure it prints is a live formula in a free workbook.
The quickest way into credit, private credit and distressed debt is The Distressed Debt Investor, the most read title in this list. The others go deeper into one job or one asset each. Every book below has a free companion page with the workbooks, so the arithmetic can be checked before the book is bought.
A Practical Career and Implementation Guide to Special Situations, Restructuring, and Investing Across the Capital Structure
A recovery model driven off visible assumptions, with a waterfall that moves when enterprise value moves. Special situations, restructuring, the fulcrum.
Worked example: Does the fulcrum security move when enterprise value changes?
Worked example: What an 80-cent recovery is actually worth
The erosion is 47.7 per cent, not the 28.7 the headline implies — 1.20 points of net return, fifteen per cent of everything the strategy earns.
Worked example: How much room a 1.15x downside actually leaves
A Practitioner's Guide to One Borrower, Four EBITDAs, and the Number That Decides Whether the Loan Is Repaid
The four workbooks behind Credit Analysis: the add-back bridge with a switch on every line, both covenants and which one binds, the downside carried through to cash and the recovery, and expected loss against the margin.
Worked example: What is an EBITDA add-back bridge actually worth in leverage turns?
Five free Excel workbooks: twenty-eight quarters of a unitranche, the add-back that is the only thing passing the test, and a cure that costs 5.5 times the other.
Worked example: What is a 50 basis point MFN actually worth to an existing lender?
A Practitioner's Guide to Synthetic Securitization, Regulatory Capital Relief, and How a Bank and a Credit Fund Price the Same Tranche
The six workbooks that produced every figure in Significant Risk Transfer, corrected, with a blank set, working documents, forty questions and three cases. Free, no sign-up.
Worked example: Should a retained 1250 per cent position be deducted or risk-weighted?
Credit Investing by the Numbers: Bonds, Loan Funds, BDCs and Private Credit Funds, Default, Recovery and the Real Yield
The companion files of The Credit Investor: three workbooks that reproduce every figure in the book, blank working sheets for your own portfolio and a 60-minute test with its answer key.
Worked example: How do you calculate a high-yield bond's yield after expected default losses?
The Appendix C borrowing base running live off a tape of 1,880 contracts, the Meridian transaction end to end, and trigger design. Free Excel workbooks.
Worked example: How do you set an advance rate from a loss curve?
Coming soon on Amazon · Free companion files
The companion files of The Corporate Restructuring Handbook: three workbooks that reproduce every figure in the book, a blank 13-week cash flow and waterfall, six working forms, forty questions and three worked cases.
Coming soon on Amazon · Free companion files
Start with The Distressed Debt Investor by Julian R. Sterling. It is the most read title in this list, and like the others it is built on one fully specified worked case whose every printed figure is reproduced in a free Excel workbook.
Yes. Every title in this guide has a free companion page on julianrsterling.com with the workbooks, blank templates and checklists. They need no account and no email address.
Analysts, associates and managers who need to compute the numbers rather than describe them: each book follows one case from the first input to the decision, at practitioner level.
Real estate investing, finance and fund management · Private equity and private markets · Infrastructure, data centres and energy · Corporate finance, valuation and markets · Regulation, compliance and banking · Business operations: cost, contracts, pricing and supply chain · Personal finance and investing for beginners