The Forensic Equity Investor: Reading Footnotes as Narrative
Shaun Heelan of MAAT Investment Group on bringing credit discipline to equity analysis, presented at The Zurich Project 2026
LISTEN HERE: LATTICEWORK
We were delighted to welcome Shaun Heelan of MAAT Investment Group to The Zurich Project 2026, and we are grateful to Shaun for sharing his wisdom and insights with our community of fund managers and allocators. Zurich Project proceedings are kept confidential by default; with Shaun’s approval, we are pleased to share the audio replay and transcript of his session.
Shaun serves as Chief Investment Officer of MAAT Investment Group, based in Munich. He brings more than 20 years of investment experience across a broad range of asset classes, spanning both the sell-side and the buy-side and covering everything from highly liquid instruments to complex, illiquid assets. His disciplined investment process has shaped MAAT’s philosophy and long-term approach.
The core argument is that equity analysis benefits enormously from credit discipline. Where equity work typically starts with the income statement and ends with a price target, credit work starts with the footnotes and ends with a downside floor. Shaun’s “indenture mindset” rests on four pillars: (1) map every claim ahead of the equity owner before forming a view on value; (2) treat the footnotes as the contract when the income statement is merely the term sheet; (3) keep model assumptions explicit rather than buried in a base case; and (4) price the downside before contemplating the upside. No derivatives trader would ignore the strike price of an option, he observed, yet equity investors routinely say they never look at the debt.
A cautionary detour through the 1MDB bond showed that credit markets are hardly immune to narrative. A $3 billion issuance whose 104-page prospectus disclosed an implied $283 million placement commission, an explicitly non-binding letter of support, no security, no auditor, and no stated use of proceeds nonetheless traded at a premium for three years, on a pickup of roughly 50 basis points over the index.
The centerpiece is a case study of Vistry Group, the UK homebuilder once touted as Britain’s analogue to NVR. After three profit warnings in late 2024 cut the shares from around £14 to roughly £6.50, consensus held that management had cleared the decks. MAAT wanted to believe the thesis and, after doing the forensic work, could not. In Shaun’s analysis, volume targets exceeded anything achieved in the history of UK homebuilding; the partnership model’s roughly 18% gross margins made 12% EBIT targets arithmetically implausible; and reported net debt of £242 million sat alongside estimated peak intra-year net debt near £1.2 billion, land creditor obligations approaching £1 billion, and provisions that had grown nearly tenfold. MAAT’s forensic debt estimate of roughly £2.6 billion adds about three turns of leverage to a single-digit-margin business, and on stressed asset values the apparent upside inverts into a materially negative outcome.
Shaun’s talk walks through the arithmetic step by step, including the governance signals surfaced by MAAT’s channel checks and the reasons Shaun believes this edge is structurally durable in European small and mid caps, where MiFID II has hollowed out research coverage. It is a masterclass in reading disclosure the way a credit analyst reads an indenture.
