- Advisor guild
- The small, specialized set of bankers, lawyers, and lenders who build transactions; because its members are chosen for the deal ahead, the appearance of a specialist reveals what kind of deal is being priced and whether it can be funded.
- Base rate
- How often a given signal appears when no deal is behind it. A signal should move your estimate in inverse proportion to its base rate — common events that fire constantly tell you little, while rare events carry more weight when they occur.
- Capacity commitment
- A large, long-lived, hard-to-reverse spending decision — a facility, a supply contract, a block of power or infrastructure — that reveals a strategic decision has effectively already been made, since it only pays off inside a plan the firm has committed to.
- Convergence
- Agreement among genuinely independent families of evidence — people-signals, advisor signals, capacity commitments — all pointing at the same counterparty in the same window; it closes off innocent explanations because coincidence across independent actors is improbable.
- Cost-and-specificity test
- The screen for whether a candidate signal carries information: how costly and specific was it to produce, and could it have been produced just as easily if nothing were happening? Costly, specific, hard-to-fake moves inform; cheap, vague ones do not.
- Hiring wave
- A cluster of job postings concentrated in one function or geography and opened in a compressed window; its coordination, not any single posting, carries information because it reflects a deliberate, budgeted decision to build a capability quickly.
- Invented seat
- A newly created senior role whose title only makes sense against a transaction, such as a head of integration or corporate development at a firm with nothing yet to integrate; a costly tell that a company is building the exact capability a deal would require.
- People-signal
- An observable human commitment — an executive appointment, a hiring wave, a departure, an advisor mandate — that reveals a company's intentions before it discloses them, because the commitment had to be made and staffed ahead of any announcement.