Financial Analysis interview preparation

Questions

100

Traced to a firm

42

Firms

28

Updated

September 2026

Asked at

All firmsMoody's7Bain Capital3SSState Street3AMAres Management2BLBlackRock2DED.E. Shaw2MSMorgan Stanley2Oaktree Capital Management2S&P Global2Bridgewater Associates1Citadel1FTFranklin Templeton1Golub Capital1HWHarris Williams1Houlihan Lokey1J.P. Morgan1Jane Street1MWMarshall Wace1Millennium Management1Morningstar1PIMCO1Sycamore Partners1TSTruist Securities1Two Sigma1Vanguard1WMWellington 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

Level

AnyCoreIntermediateHard

Type

AnyTechnicalCaseBrainteaserMarket viewFit

1. 043What does 'good' look like?Variance and management reportingIntermediatetechnicalGolub CapitalAnalytics · Chicago · 2023

   Say this

   Good is defined against a benchmark and a decision, never in the abstract. So my answer is that I would not accept the question without asking what we are measuring, compared with what, and what we would do differently at each answer.

   Then walk it

   1. The three benchmarks worth naming: our own history, our plan, and someone external, either a competitor or a best-in-class function. A number that beats last year and misses the plan and lags the peer group needs all three to be understood.
   2. Then define it as a level plus a direction plus a consistency. A 14 percent margin that is stable and improving is good; the same 14 percent that swung from 20 to 9 to 14 is not, even though the average is identical.
   3. Then attach it to a decision. For a reporting function, good might be a five-day close with zero post-publication restatements and forecast accuracy inside 5 percent. For a portfolio company it might be EBITDA conversion to cash above 80 percent. If nothing changes at the threshold, the metric is decoration.
   4. In an analytics or credit seat I would answer it about the work itself: good means the number is right, it is reproducible by someone else from the source, it arrives before the decision is made, and it comes with the one sentence that says what to do about it.
   5. And I would be explicit about what good is not: not the most detailed, not the prettiest dashboard, not the most conservative. Those are all ways of avoiding a judgement.
   6. So the short version: good is a defined threshold, against a named comparison, that changes a decision when it is crossed.

   Where candidates lose it

   Answering with adjectives. The question is deliberately open and it is testing whether you instinctively ask 'compared with what, and what would we do differently'. Push back for the benchmark, then give a concrete threshold.

   Expect next

   • Then what does good look like for a reporting analyst?
   • How would you set the threshold if you had no peer data?
   • What does bad look like?

   Reported by candidates at Golub Capital (Analytics, Chicago, 2023). 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.