Equity Research interview preparation
Sell side and buy side. Every question is either traced to a named firm from a public candidate report, or tagged at desk level when we could not trace it. Answers lead with the point, then the mechanism, then the limitation.
100 questions, mapped to the firms that asked them
- Questions
- 100
- Traced to a firm
- 72
- Firms
- 45
- Updated
- September 2026
036How would you forecast revenue for a company you have never modelled before?Houlihan LokeyInvestment Banking · New York · 2026
Say this
Build it from drivers, never from a growth rate. Find the two physical quantities that multiply to revenue, price and volume in some form, then forecast each separately against something observable.
Then walk it
- Decompose first. A retailer is stores times sales per store. An airline is available seat miles times load factor times yield. A software business is customers times average revenue per customer. A bank is loan balances times net interest margin.
- Forecast each driver against something external: industry capacity, population, disposable income, an installed base, a contract backlog. That makes the forecast falsifiable and lets you update it when the external data moves.
- Cross-check top-down. If your bottom-up build implies the company takes six points of market share in two years, you need a reason. Reconciling bottom-up to market size is the sanity check that catches most bad models.
- Separate organic from acquired growth. A company growing 15 percent of which 10 is bought is a completely different business from one growing 15 organically, and blending them hides that.
- Then sanity-check against history: is the implied growth faster than the company has ever achieved? If so, say why this time is different, or lower it.
- A flat growth-rate assumption is acceptable only in the terminal years, and even then you should say what it implies.
Where candidates lose it
Applying a growth percentage to last year's revenue. It cannot be argued with, cannot be updated by new data, and gives you no basis for a variant view. Driver-based building is the entire point.
Expect next
- What is the driver for the company we cover?
- How do you reconcile bottom-up to market size?
- Where does your forecast differ from consensus?
Reported by candidates at Houlihan Lokey (Investment Banking, New York, 2026). Source: Wall Street Oasis.
Firm tags come from public, anonymous candidate reports on Wall Street Oasis: strong signal, not sworn testimony. Firms are named as the places a question was reported, not as partners of Fin Maverick. Answers are written for this page to show how to think out loud; they are not scripts to recite.