Financial Analysis interview preparation

The three statements, working capital, ratios, forecasting, variance analysis, costing, capital budgeting, valuation and the modelling and Excel work that fills the day, plus the fit questions about why this seat. 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 — we do not invent attributions.

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100 questions, mapped to the firms that asked them

Questions
100
Traced to a firm
42
Firms
28
Updated
September 2026
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All firmsMoody's7Bain Capital3State Street3Ares Management2BlackRock2D.E. Shaw2Morgan Stanley2Oaktree Capital Management2S&P Global2Bridgewater Associates1Citadel1Franklin Templeton1Golub Capital1Harris Williams1Houlihan Lokey1J.P. Morgan1Jane Street1Marshall Wace1Millennium Management1Morningstar1PIMCO1Sycamore Partners1Truist Securities1Two Sigma1Vanguard1Wellington Management1Wells Fargo Securities1Wolverine Trading1
Topic
All topicsThree statements9Accounting policy and standards5Working capital and cash7Ratio analysis8Forecasting and budgeting9Variance and management reporting7Unit economics and costing8Capital budgeting7Cost of capital and valuation7Markets and rates5Modelling, Excel and data8Business partnering6Brainteasers and estimation4Fit and career10
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  1. 058I give you a list of possible projects with their values and their costs, and a fixed budget. How do you choose?Capital budgetingHardcase studyBridgewater AssociatesGeneralist · New York · 2025

    Say this

    Rank by value per rupee of the constrained resource, not by absolute value. Compute the profitability index, NPV divided by the capital required, take them in descending order until the budget runs out, then check the combinations near the cut-off because the greedy answer is not always optimal.

    Then walk it

    1. Profitability index is present value of inflows over the initial investment, or equivalently one plus NPV over investment. Anything above one adds value; ranking by it maximises value per unit of the scarce resource.
    2. A quick illustration. Budget 100. Project A: NPV 30, cost 60, index 0.50. Project B: NPV 18, cost 40, index 0.45. Project C: NPV 16, cost 40, index 0.40. Greedy picks A then B for 48 of NPV on 100 spent. Picking B and C gives 34. So A plus B wins, but you only know that because you checked.
    3. The reason you check is indivisibility. Projects cannot be taken in fractions, so this is a knapsack problem, and greedy ranking can leave budget stranded. With a handful of projects, enumerate the combinations; with many, solve it as an integer programme, which Excel Solver will do.
    4. Then the constraints that make it a real decision rather than an arithmetic one: mutual exclusivity where two projects do the same thing, dependencies where B requires A, and non-capital constraints like scarce engineering time, which may be the binding resource rather than money.
    5. Then the multi-period version. A project may be delayable, so the question becomes which projects this year and which next, and a one-year delay on a positive-NPV project has a real cost you should quantify rather than assume away.
    6. And I would flag the strategic overlay: some low-index projects are mandatory, safety, regulatory or IT security, so they come out of the budget before ranking begins. Pretending everything competes on index is how compliance projects get deferred until they become a crisis.

    Where candidates lose it

    Ranking by NPV alone, which strands capital, or by IRR, which ignores scale. The word the interviewer wants is profitability index, followed immediately by the acknowledgement that indivisibility makes greedy ranking imperfect.

    Expect next

    • What if two of the projects are mutually exclusive?
    • What if the binding constraint is engineers, not money?
    • How would you handle a project you can delay by a year?

    Reported by candidates at Bridgewater Associates (Generalist, New York, 2025). 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.