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

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Type

AnyTechnicalCaseBrainteaserMarket viewFit

1. 089How would you fix the city of Baltimore?Brainteasers and estimationHardsuperdayMSMorgan StanleyUtilities · Baltimore · 2025

   Say this

   Treat a city like an entity with a P&L, a balance sheet and a customer base. Define what 'fix' means, diagnose whether the problem is revenue, cost or population, then pick two interventions with the best return per rupee and say how you would measure them.

   Then walk it

   1. Define the objective first, out loud, because the question is deliberately unbounded. I would take it as: reverse population decline and restore a sustainable budget, because most city problems are downstream of those two.
   2. Then the diagnosis as a financial structure. Revenue is property tax, which depends on population and property values. Cost is pensions, debt service, policing, schools and infrastructure, most of which is fixed. That is a high-operating-leverage entity facing a declining top line, which is the actual problem.
   3. So the doom loop is the mechanism to name: population falls, tax base shrinks, services get cut, more people leave. Any fix has to break the loop rather than balance the budget for one year, because balancing it with service cuts accelerates the decline.
   4. Then prioritise interventions by leverage, not by sympathy. Two candidates: make the tax base competitive with the surrounding county so families stop leaving, and concentrate capital on a small number of blocks rather than spreading it thinly, because urban recovery is non-linear and needs density to hold.
   5. Then fund it honestly: the balance sheet has assets, land, parking, utilities, and the pension liability is the real constraint, so any plan that does not address pension cost is arithmetic theatre.
   6. Then measurement and a time frame: net migration, vacancy rate, and tax collection per capita, reviewed annually, with a stated expectation that this is a ten-year programme. And I would say plainly what I am not confident about, because pretending to solve a city in four minutes is the wrong answer to this question.

   Where candidates lose it

   Listing policy opinions. It is a structuring test. Define the objective, name the revenue-cost-population mechanism, pick two prioritised interventions and say how you would measure them. Political commentary scores zero.

   Expect next

   • Which intervention first, and what would it cost?
   • How would you fund it?
   • How would you know in two years whether it was working?

   Reported by candidates at Morgan Stanley (Utilities, Baltimore, 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.