Deal Intelligence is not investment, legal, tax or accounting advice. Every material fact is taken from documents that are already public, or from arithmetic on those documents. Read the independence and disclaimer before you treat a number as something you can act on.
Deal Intelligence is a public-record product. If a fact cannot be pointed at a document a reader can open, it does not belong in the article as a fact. This page is the hierarchy, the ledger rules, and the list of things the desk will not touch.
Acquiry does not use material non-public information in Deal Intelligence. It does not use data rooms, mandate files, unpublished models, or private management conversations as sources for these reports. Advisory work and the research desk are separate. If that ever failed on a specific article, the article would have to say so. Silence means the page was built from public documents.
Source hierarchy
Prefer the closest primary document. Do not cite an aggregator when the issuer filing or announcement exists.
| Tier | What counts | How it is labelled |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Primary | Exchange filings (SEC, SEDAR+, ASX, Companies House packages that are actually filed), merger agreements and scheme booklets, issuer IR announcements, official buyer or target press releases on their own domains, earnings releases, audited reports, licence registers, court or regulator decisions | Public record / disclosed |
| 2 · Highly credible secondary | Reuters, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, specialist institutional trade press quoting or circulating a primary document | Reported. Used to confirm circulation, not to replace the filing |
| 3 · Supporting | Named interviews already on the record, industry databases, adviser announcements, product documentation the companies publish for customers | Named, and never presented as a disclosure of deal terms |
A trade article that says "people familiar with the matter" is not Tier 1. It can be mentioned as reported colour only when the desk is explicit that it is reported, and it cannot carry a price, a close date, or a stake percentage that the issuer has not published.
The source ledger
Each report ends with a numbered ledger. Non-editorial rows outbound to the real press release, IR page, regulator file, or trade URL. They never outbound to acquiry.com pretending to be the document. Related reading, which is a different module, links other Deal Intelligence articles.
Body copy uses superscript citations that jump to the ledger. The lead does not hyperlink "the company announcement" or "Reuters reported". That pattern reads like a generated summary of other people's links. The document is in the ledger. The sentence in the article should still make sense if the reader never clicks.
Language, translation, and excerpts
Many digital deals file first in French, German, Korean, Japanese or Spanish. The desk reads those filings. English in the article is Acquiry's, except where a phrase is a defined term that should stay in the original (a French offre publique, a Korean disclosure form code, an ASX ticker). We do not pretend a machine translation is the official English version. Where an issuer later files an official English translation, that file joins the ledger and can replace an earlier reading if it differs.
Quoted phrases are short. Long paste-ups of a filing belong in the filing.
What we will not use
- Material non-public information, whether it arrived through a mandate, a friend, or a misplaced email.
- Hack dumps, stolen files, or screenshots of systems the public cannot access.
- Unnamed Slack screenshots and "a source told us" economics.
- Paywalled body text we cannot show a reader how to verify. The public headline and the issuer document are enough.
- Competitor gossip offered as a multiple.
- Acquiry's own unpublished workpapers from a live mandate about the same parties.
What "AI-driven" means on this desk
AI-driven technology is used to watch and cluster public announcements so the desk does not miss a filing at 6am. It is not a source. It is not a witness. It does not become a row in the ledger. If a number appears in an article, it came from a document or from arithmetic on documents, and the ledger or the calculation note will show which.
Monitoring can be wrong in the usual ways: a headline that is not a deal, two companies with similar names, a "talks" story with no agreement. Editorial reading of the actual file is the gate. That is why rights deals and property headlines get skipped even when they trend.
Worked examples
Merkur / Société Française de Casinos. The public facts are the 17 September 2026 SPA, 95 percent of Casigrangi, 81.21 percent of SFC already held by that vehicle, a transparency price of €6.19 a share, and a Q1 2027 Interior close target. Those go in as disclosed. A reverse-engineered Casigrangi enterprise value does not, because the issuer did not publish one.
Telix / ITM. The cash-free, debt-free upfront of US$1.65 billion, the share mix, and the contingent ITM-11 milestones are in the announcement. Adding the contingent pot to the upfront and printing a single "headline value" as if it were a cheque written today is arithmetic, and it is labelled that way. It is not a disclosed purchase price.