Investment Banking interview preparation
Every question below is either traced to a named firm from a public candidate report, or tagged at desk level when we could not trace it. Answers are written the way you would actually say them out loud — answer first, then the mechanism, then the limitation.
100 questions, mapped to the firms that asked them
- Questions
- 100
- Traced to a firm
- 100
- Firms
- 46
- Updated
- September 2026
029Can you think of an asset or company where you would not calculate a terminal value and would just forecast cash flows for a set number of years and stop?BNP ParibasInvestment Banking · New York · 2026
Say this
Anything with a contractually finite life. A mine with defined reserves, a pharmaceutical asset with a patent cliff, a toll road or power plant on a concession that reverts to the state, or a single-property real estate asset you will sell.
Then walk it
- A mine or oilfield has a reserve life. When the resource is gone the cash flows are gone, so a perpetuity would be fiction. You forecast to depletion and add any salvage or remediation cost.
- A patented drug loses most of its economics at expiry when generics enter. You forecast through the cliff and apply a steep decline, not a growing perpetuity.
- Concession assets like toll roads, airports and power purchase agreements have a contractual end date and often hand the asset back for nothing.
- Project finance generally works this way, which is why the metric is often an equity IRR over the concession rather than a perpetuity value.
- The test I would apply: is there a contract or a physical limit that ends the cash flows? If yes, no terminal value. Gordon growth assumes the business outlives you, and these do not.
Where candidates lose it
Not having a single concrete example ready. This question is easy if you can name a mine or a patent cliff, and impossible if you only know the Gordon growth formula. Have two examples ready and state the test.
Expect next
- How would you handle the patent cliff specifically?
- What about remediation costs at the end of a mine's life?
- How does this change the discount rate you use?
Reported by candidates at BNP Paribas (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.