PromptSharp › Daily briefs › Finance › July 15, 2026

Finance prompt of the day

July 15, 2026 · for Investment banking, sales & trading, equity research, FP&A. One sharp, copy-paste prompt — free, every weekday.

You are a leveraged-finance associate reviewing a DEBT TERM SHEET I paste: [PASTE TERM SHEET / CREDIT-AGREEMENT SUMMARY: tranches, pricing, covenants, baskets]. Produce:
1. A COVENANT MAP: financial maintenance covenants, incurrence tests, and the key negative covenants — each summarized in plain English with the headroom implied where computable.
2. A FLEXIBILITY / LEAKAGE read: restricted-payment, investment, and debt-incurrence baskets; EBITDA add-back definitions; and any portability, MFN, or builder-basket features.
3. A MISSING-PROTECTION scan (borrower vs lender view — say which you are taking): the clause or test you would expect for this credit that is absent or unusually loose.
4. The 5 questions to raise with counsel before signing.

Rules: Do not invent, estimate, or extrapolate any figure — if a number is not in what I give you, write "not provided" and flag it. Mark every claim I should verify externally before relying on it. Never use, infer, or request material non-public information (MNPI) or client-confidential data. Treat the output as a first draft for professional review before any external use.

What changed for Finance

How to run “Leveraged-loan / term-sheet covenant interrogation”, step by step

The situation this prompt is built for: You have a debt term sheet or credit agreement summary and need the covenant package and the missing protections surfaced. Below is exactly what to feed it and what comes back — no model-specific tricks, it runs the same in any chat AI.

What each placeholder does

Demo profile for the example fills: a equity research associate on a mid-cap sector coverage team, working in Excel, a chat AI model, and your firm's data terminal. Swap in your own context — or save it once at /profile and copied prompts arrive pre-filled.

• [PASTE TERM SHEET / CREDIT-AGREEMENT SUMMARY: tranches, pricing, covenants, baskets] — this is the input the whole output quality hangs on. Each part narrows the answer: paste term sheet; credit-agreement summary: tranches; pricing; covenants; baskets. Demo fill: your own paste term sheet / credit-agreement summary: tranches, pricing, covenants, baskets — one or two concrete lines beats a paragraph of vague context. Leave it vague and the model pads with boilerplate; make it concrete and every section downstream sharpens.

What the model hands back

The prompt forces a fixed deliverable shape, so you get a document, not a ramble:

1. A COVENANT MAP: financial maintenance covenants, incurrence tests, and the key negative covenants — each summarized in plain English with the headroom implied where computable.
2. A FLEXIBILITY / LEAKAGE read: restricted-payment, investment, and debt-incurrence baskets; EBITDA add-back definitions; and any portability, MFN, or builder-basket features.
3. A MISSING-PROTECTION scan (borrower vs lender view — say which you are taking): the clause or test you would expect for this credit that is absent or unusually loose.
4. The 5 questions to raise with counsel before signing.

Why this structure works

Covenant risk lives in the clause that ISN'T there and in add-back definitions nobody read; a structured map plus an explicit missing-protection scan is exactly the review a senior credit professional runs before a term sheet is countersigned.

On Pro, the missing-protection checklist arrives calibrated to your side of the table (sponsor vs lender) and your firm's covenant norms from the profile you set once.

When to use it — and when not to

Reach for it when

• You have a debt term sheet or credit agreement summary and need the covenant package and the missing protections surfaced.
• You can actually supply the inputs it asks for ([PASTE TERM SHEET / CREDIT-AGREEMENT SUMMARY: tranches, pricing, covenants, baskets]) — this prompt is an amplifier for real context, not a substitute for it.
• You need the output in a shape you can forward as-is — the fixed structure above is the point.

Skip it when

• You don’t yet have the source material — the prompt is built to refuse to fake it. Its own guardrail: “Do not invent, estimate, or extrapolate any figure — if a number is not in what I give you, write "not provided" and flag it.” With nothing to work from, you’ll get a list of “not provided” flags, which is honest but not useful. Collect the inputs first.
• The task is genuinely one sentence long — a structured prompt earns its overhead when the output has parts. For quick one-off questions, just ask.

Adapting today’s prompt for adjacent roles

“Leveraged-loan / term-sheet covenant interrogation” sits in the Banking lane of the finance pool. If your seat is one desk over, these are the same craft-move rebuilt for the neighbouring workflow — pulled from the same curated pool, each free in full at its permalink:

You are a volatility trader framing an EVENT-VOL read for [NAME] into [EVENT: earnings / data / decision, date]. Using only figures I paste, produce: 1. An…

You are a PM's analyst running a QUARTERLY PORTFOLIO REVIEW from the data I paste (positions, weights, contribution, thesis notes). Produce: 1. An ATTRIBUTION read: the…

You are a credit analyst reviewing DEBT CAPACITY & COVENANT HEADROOM for [COMPANY] from the data I paste (debt schedule, EBITDA/cash flow, covenants). Produce: 1. A…

Common failure modes (and the fixes)

• Failure: letting the model drift past the prompt’s own guardrail — “Do not invent, estimate, or extrapolate any figure — if a number is not in what I give you, write "not provided" and flag it.” Fix: keep that line in when you edit the prompt; it exists because this is exactly where outputs go wrong without it.
• Failure: letting the model drift past the prompt’s own guardrail — “Mark every claim I should verify externally before relying on it.” Fix: keep that line in when you edit the prompt; it exists because this is exactly where outputs go wrong without it.
• Failure: letting the model drift past the prompt’s own guardrail — “Never use, infer, or request material non-public information (MNPI) or client-confidential data.” Fix: keep that line in when you edit the prompt; it exists because this is exactly where outputs go wrong without it.
• Failure: filling [PASTE TERM SHEET / CREDIT-AGREEMENT SUMMARY: tranches, pricing, covenants, baskets] with a vague summary. The output can only be as specific as this input — generic context in, generic deliverable out. Fix: paste raw specifics (real names, real numbers, real constraints), then trim the model’s output, not your input.
• Failure: accepting the first pass. Fix: reply with one line — “now cut everything that is generic to any company and keep only what is specific to mine” — the cheapest quality doubling available.

Where AI is landing for investment banking right now

Context for today’s prompt, from the same screened sources the daily brief reads. Our read, with sources linked — the pattern across items like these is consistent: the professionals getting leverage from AI are the ones feeding it real working context, which is exactly the muscle today’s prompt trains.

• IBM Misses, IBM’s Mainframe Moat, IBM’s Many AI Problems (rss) — IBM announced preliminary results that spooked the software market generally; this is a story, however, specifically about IBM and its mainframe franchise.

Quick answers

Is “Leveraged-loan / term-sheet covenant interrogation” free to use?

Yes — every weekday issue of the PromptSharp Finance publishes one full pool prompt free on the web, and it stays free in the archive. Pro is the daily full prompt set, the searchable archive, personalization, and MCP delivery — not a paywall on this page.

Which AI model does this prompt work with?

Any of them. Every PromptSharp prompt is model-agnostic plain text — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, or a local model. No plugins, no custom GPTs; paste and run.

How is the finance prompt of the day chosen?

Deterministic rotation over the curated finance pool — currently 75 prompts across 5 sections — the same single source the paid brief reads. Same date, same prompt: the archive never silently changes under you.

What goes in the [BRACKETED] placeholders?

Your context — the walkthrough above covers each one. The short rule: the more concrete the fill (real names, numbers, constraints), the sharper the output. Save your details once at /profile and web copies arrive pre-filled.

How do I get this in my inbox instead?

The capture form above — PromptSharp Finance status is honest: live briefs send every weekday; pre-launch verticals email their free list the day the email edition starts.

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