Hedge Funds interview preparation

Questions

100

Traced to a firm

39

Firms

16

Updated

September 2026

Asked at

All firmsMan Group10Balyasny Asset Management7Bridgewater Associates3DED.E. Shaw3Apollo Global Management2KKR2Oaktree Capital Management2Point722SCSquarepoint Capital2ACAQR Capital Management1BGBaupost Group1Coatue Management1HPS Investment Partners1Northern Trust1Viking Global Investors1Wolverine Trading1

Topic

All topicsStrategy taxonomy8Stock pitch10Short selling6Portfolio construction8Risk and drawdown8Performance and alpha7Event-driven and merger arb8Distressed and credit5Fund structure and economics7Financing, NAV and operations6Compliance and research process5Quant and systematic6India and Category III AIFs5Career and fit11

Level

AnyCoreIntermediateHard

Type

AnyTechnicalMarket viewBrainteaserCaseFit

1. 088What does the Indian hedge fund landscape actually look like?India and Category III AIFsCoretechnicalIndian hedge fundsIndian asset management

   Say this

   Small but growing fast, and dominated by long-biased and arbitrage strategies rather than market neutral. The domestic vehicle is the Category III AIF, the capital comes largely from high net worth individuals and family offices, and separately there is a large offshore community of foreign funds trading India through the FPI route.

   Then walk it

   1. Two distinct populations, and it helps to separate them. Domestic managers running Category III AIFs and PMS mandates for Indian HNI money, and offshore funds accessing India as foreign portfolio investors or through participatory notes and swaps.
   2. The domestic side has grown quickly off a small base, with AIF commitments across all categories running into several lakh crore rupees, though Category III is a minority of that and far smaller than the mutual fund industry, which manages tens of lakh crore.
   3. Strategy mix reflects the market's constraints: long-biased equity with index hedging, cash-futures and index arbitrage, event-driven and merger situations, some quant and factor products, and a growing set of credit and structured strategies in Category II.
   4. The talent pool comes from domestic brokerages, mutual fund and insurance research desks, the global banks' and asset managers' India research centres, and increasingly from analysts returning from Singapore, Hong Kong, London and New York.
   5. The structural tailwinds are real: domestic financialisation, systematic investment plan flows creating a deep and steady buyer base, rising HNI wealth, and a deepening derivatives market. The constraints are also real: the short side, the 1 crore minimum, the tax treatment, and a retail-dominated flow environment.
   6. Say the honest strategic conclusion, because that is what an interviewer wants. India rewards fundamental long-biased stock picking in mid and small caps where coverage is thin, and it punishes strategies that need cheap and reliable shorting. Anyone claiming to run a US-style market-neutral book in India should be asked how they source their shorts.

   Where candidates lose it

   Answering as though the Indian market were a smaller copy of the US one. The structure is genuinely different: retail and derivative dominated, steady domestic inflows, weak stock lending. Also be able to name the two populations, domestic AIFs and offshore FPIs, because candidates often only know one of them exists.

   Expect next

   • Where is the best alpha opportunity in India right now?
   • What is the FPI route and how does an offshore fund use it?
   • Why has the mutual fund industry grown faster than AIFs?

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.