To begin, and on behalf of the entire GT Securities team, we wish you and yours a healthy, prosperous, and inspired 2026. In my conversations with many of you over the past few weeks, there’s a sense that after several years of starts, stops, resets, and recalibration, the 2026 deal environment is finally lining up for independent bankers to truly thrive. Here are three mindsets and focus areas I’m seeing from the top-performing bankers heading into ’26: Lean into Investor Relationshi...

Attending ACG SoCal 2025 this past month – coming roughly five months after being at ACG DealMAX 2025 in Las Vegas in April – reminded me once again how fast market sentiment can shift. In Vegas in April, tariff concerns, market volatility, and broader macroeconomic uncertainty were dampening deal confidence. By September in LA, that fog had lifted. The mood in Beverly Hills was light and confident, with a shared, unspoken understanding eternally characteristic of all hot and good deal mar...

YTD deal markets have been a mixed bag at best. While middle market fundamentals are very good – a ton of PE dry powder on the sidelines, pent-up demand from companies looking to sell businesses / funds looking to raise capital – but a “crisis” narrative around tariffs, geopolitics, interest rates, inflation, and more has caught dealmakers in a cycle of “wait and see.” But here in mid-July 2025, it finally feels that buyers and sellers alike have adjusted to this latest “new normal” and ar...

After a solid start to the year, private capital deal activity stalled in March, depressed by tariff uncertainty and extremely volatile and downward trending public markets. The good news? Over the past few weeks, conditions have taken a decidedly positive turn. Public markets have recovered nearly all of their losses, and cooling inflation and better than expected private-sector job growth are driving hope for a rebound in business and consumer confidence, which in turn could really “unst...

The best and easiest way to become great at something is to identify someone who already is…and do as they do. In this spirit (and in what has now become an annual tradition), please let me share observations as to best practices of our platform’s highest earning bankers. I’ll start with something that should be very obvious but is often overlooked: high-performing bankers are, almost without exception, fantastic and very serious human beings. It starts with work ethic.  Very many of th...