capital-structuring-ibskill loadedOne line in. The full deck out.
Where we come from, and where we go today.
You left with six things
capital-structuring-ib skillcapital-structuring-ib and read what is inside.A folder, one text file, and a method written once. What it is, and what it is not.
01Research Airbus SE's current credit profile…
02Consolidate this into an investor profile and export it as Excel…
03The CFO wants a single financing recommendation… Give me the diagnostic first.
04Recommend one financing solution and explain what you eliminate…
05Build the PowerPoint deliverable, following the template…
Airbus SE. EUR 10bn over five years. Keep the rating. One argued recommendation, and the deck.
capital-structuring-ib does the rest.
Same company, same brief, same eleven slides. Not the model, not the question: the method, written once.
capital-structuring-ib/SKILL.mdthe methoddeck-template.mdoptionalexample-airbus.mdoptionalA folder. One text file inside, always the same name. Other files next to it if you want: a template, an example, a checklist.
Inside the file: the steps in order, the output format, the conventions, what to check before you finish.
Method, not data. Your client, your numbers, your files stay in the conversation. The skill says how to work. Not on what.
Claude reads it when it needs it. Not before.
capital-structuring-ib--- name: capital-structuring-ib description: Use when a CFO asks how to finance a need under a rating constraint. Triggers on: capital structuring, financing recommendation, instrument choice. ---
## Construction sequence (5 blocks, in order)
1. Financial diagnostic 2. Need analysis
3. Comparison grid 4. Recommendation
5. Market conditions
## Presentation conventions
Every figure with its source and date.
"To be verified" on anything unconfirmed.
Never the recommendation before the diagnostic.
## Deliverable, PowerPoint output
PURPLE 581D74 · BLUE 2690B7 · Montserrat / Calibri
11 slides: Title, Context, Diagnostic, Need, Grid,
Recommendation, Elimination, Market, Bank, Risks, Disclaimer
Nothing technical. A document. A good analyst wrote it.
The only part Claude reads all the time. The rest of the skill stays closed until the description matches your request.
Helps with finance.
When should Claude open it? It does not know. So it does not.
Use when a CFO asks how to finance a need under a rating constraint. Triggers on: capital structuring, financing recommendation, instrument choice.
Now Claude knows. And so does your colleague.
Write it for the reader who decides in one second. That reader is Claude.
The description is how Claude decides. The name is how you decide. Same skill, same method, same deck at the end.
Airbus SE. EUR 10bn over five years. Keep the rating. One argued recommendation, and the deck.
Your words match the description. Claude opens the skill. You never named it.
The normal way. You ask for the work, not for the tool.
/capital-structuring-ib Airbus SE, EUR 10bn, keep the rating.
A slash, the name, your request. Nothing to match. Nothing to guess.
When you know which skill you want. Or when two of them could answer.
If you have to name it every time, the skill is not the problem. The description is.
Prompt, project, skill, connector. Four places to put what you know. Which one, for what.
Last week you used all four without naming them. The mistake is to put everything in the first drawer.
And when not to. A task you do once. A prompt is enough.
A skill travels. Your colleague installs it. Think of it as a document that leaves your desk.
The skill says how. The conversation says on what.
Three levels of reading. And why you can have fifty skills without a problem.
Last week, the box: everything you give it has to fit. So Claude does not read fifty skills. It reads three levels.
Cheap to carry. Loaded when useful. Nothing else.
How did Claude know how to build a PowerPoint last week? Same answer. A skill, written by Anthropic. Already there.
xlsxExcelThe investor profile. Source, date, status.used last weekpptxPowerPointThe financing deck. Eleven slides, the template.used last weekdocxWordMemos, letters, anything with a table of contents.pdfPDFRead, merge, fill, extract.A skill is not exotic. It is how Claude knows how to do anything precise.
Described in plain language, the way you would brief an intern. Built on your machine, run on Airbus.
So far, you asked Claude for things. The three blocks of today give it arms, a method, and a workshop.
Prices_AIR.PA.xlsx lands in your folder, then keeps itself current.
Arms, a method, a workshop. It works on your files, even when you do not ask.
The share price moves every day. The deck does not.
Nobody reopens a pitch every morning to re-paste a chart.
By the end of the hour
Prices_AIR.PA.xlsx
One Excel file per company
In your shared folder. Company, ticker, exchange in the header. It keeps itself current.
the source
slide 2
A share-price slide in the Airbus deck
The 12-month curve, and three key figures. Drawn from the file, every time the deck is built.
the view
So we do not add a slide. We add a mechanism.
The question always comes: why go through an Excel file, and not the chart straight into the deck?
A picture. Frozen the day you paste it.
One deck, one moment. Next week, wrong. Next pitch, all over again.
The file is the source. It serves all your decks. The deck is one view of it, at one moment.
An asset. It keeps itself current, and every deck reads it.
The data and the document are two different things. Put the data in a file, and you have an asset.
We do not write the skill. We describe it. Plain language, the way you brief an intern on day one. What it fetches, where it writes, what it must never do.
Claude proposes the file format. It does not ask. That is normal: a skill is text, not code. You read it back, and you correct it.
Copy the prompt from the resources page. Send it. Watch what happens.
Create me a skill, named stock-histo-prices, that fetches:
Prices_*.xlsx in the folder, reading each file’s header for company, ticker and exchangeThree rules. Read them out loud.
One file per company. Named by its ticker. The header says which company, which listing, which source.
Never a duplicate date. A date already in the file is never rewritten, even when the source now shows another number.
“Not available”, never an estimate. A visible gap is recoverable. A fabricated price is not.
Not technical. Your analyst discipline, written down once. An estimated figure in a pitch is a wrong figure.
--- name: stock-histo-prices description: Fetch one year of daily prices for a listed company by browsing a financial data site, then merge them into one Excel file per company, never duplicating a date, never overwriting history. Use when asked for a price history, or to update every price file. --- ## What this skill is for 1. History is immutable. 2. Nothing is ever estimated. "Not available". ## File layout Prices_<TICKER>.xlsx A1 Company A2 Ticker A3 Exchange A5 Source A8 Date | Open | High | Low | Close
stock-histo-prices.skill.claude/skills/It is now in your list of skills, on every surface signed in to your account. Once. Not once per conversation.
/stock-histo-prices Airbus SE (AIR.PA, Euronext Paris) and drop the file in my Share_Prices folder. Show me the last 5 rows you fetched before saving.
Watch where the file appears. Not in the conversation. In your folder.
Prices_AIR.PA.xlsx in Excel now: the effect is there, not in the chat.A frozen file is no better than a frozen slide. Three ways to keep it current, from the most manual to the most autonomous.
Update the Airbus price file.
No slash. No skill named. The description decides. You ask for the work, not for the tool.
Update every price file.
Four words. No company, no ticker, no exchange.
Prices_*.xlsx in it.You named no company at all. That is the difference between an assistant and a tool.
Create a scheduled task: every Friday at 6pm, update every Prices_*.xlsx file in my Share_Prices folder, then send me a summary of the week’s moves by company.
It runs on your laptop, with Claude open.
Closed at six? It runs when you are back.
This is the part you cannot get from a prompt. Written once, it holds every time.
One skill produces the data. One skill produces the deck. A skill can call another skill.
capital-structuring-ib will not display a price. It asks stock-histo-prices to make sure the file is current. Then it reads that file, and draws the slide.
stock-histo-pricesMakes sure the file is currentFetches only the missing days. Or nothing, if the file is up to date.Prices_AIR.PA.xlsxThe sourceClose column, twelve months. Header: company, ticker, exchange, source.capital-structuring-ibReads the file, draws slide 2The curve, three figures, the source in the footer. Then the eleven slides you know.slide 2 of 12Share price performanceTwelve months. Rebuilt from the file every time the deck is built.One skill produces the data. One skill produces the deck. Last step, and the most important of the day.
What the new slide 2 holds
Source. Prices_<TICKER>.xlsx in the shared folder, Close column. Missing or out of date? Call stock-histo-prices first.
Content. A 12-month Close curve, in purple. Three key figures: performance in %, period high, period low, with their dates.
Footer. The source, and the date of the last close in the file.
“Show me what you intend to change before saving.” Never let a skill rewrite itself unreviewed.
Open the capital-structuring-ib skill. In the “Deliverable — PowerPoint output” block, insert a new slide in position 2, titled “Share price performance — 12 months”, shifting the existing slides down by one: the deck goes from 11 to 12 slides. It is fed by the stock-histo-prices skill.
Do not modify any other block of the skill. Show me what you intend to change before saving.
Regenerate Airbus_SE_Financing_Recommendation_S6-Training.pptx, inserting the new slide 2 from the Prices_AIR.PA.xlsx file. The 11 existing slides keep their content and shift down by one. Save the result next to the original, without overwriting it.
Twelve slides. Eleven untouched. Saved next to the original: the same rule as a minute ago, applied to a client deliverable.
The next recommendation, on any company, gets its price slide. Nothing to redo.
Three skills you take home today. And the ones you will write yourself.
stock-histo-prices
Price history
in a company, a ticker, an exchange out its price file, kept current, never a date twice
described this morning
capital-structuring-ib
Capital structuring
in a financing need out the argued recommendation, and the deck — twelve slides now
session 1 · amended today
investor-profile-ib
Investor profile
in one company out the Excel profile, sourced line by line
the prompt library, packaged
Three roads to the same thing. A need described in plain language. A method you already had, and amended. A sequence of prompts you already ran. All three on the resources page.
Find the thing you do the same way, every time.
Which one is yours?
A skill is a document. Treat it as a document.
Nothing new. It is how you already handle a template, or a checklist.
MCPYou gave Claude armsA browser that reads share prices off the web.the armsskillYou wrote a method that outlives youThe format, the rules, written once. Replayable on any company.the methodCoworkYou put it in your folder, on a scheduleThe file keeps itself current. On your laptop, with Claude open.the workshopskill → skillYou plugged one method into anotherThe deck gets its price slide. For Airbus, and for every name you cover.the chainWhat you built today is not a slide. It is a chain that produces that slide.
Homework
You take away
The point is that you touch a skill’s text at least once.
Thank you.
Rotate your device to present.