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
043Walk me through a deal you have been following, and tell me how it changed the industry.BarclaysInvestment Banking · New York · 2023EvercoreInvestment Banking · Menlo Park · 2025Moelis & CompanyInvestment Banking · London · 2026William BlairInvestment Banking · Atlanta · 2026
Say this
Pick one deal, know it cold, and tell it as a story with a number in every sentence: who bought whom, for how much, at what multiple, funded how, and why it made strategic sense.
Then walk it
- Open with the facts in one breath: acquirer, target, enterprise value, the multiple paid, the premium to the undisturbed price, and the funding mix.
- Then the strategic rationale in one sentence. What did the buyer get that it could not build, and what synergies did it guide to?
- Then your own view, which is the part that matters. Was the price defensible? I would say something like: at fourteen times EBITDA against a peer set at eleven, the buyer needed the full guided synergies to justify it, so the deal is really a bet on integration.
- Then the industry effect: did it trigger consolidation, did it force a competitor response, did it change how the sector is valued?
- Pick a deal in the group you are interviewing with, and pick one where you have an actual opinion. A deal you can only describe is worse than a smaller deal you can argue about.
Where candidates lose it
Choosing the biggest headline deal and only reciting what the press release said. If you cannot say what multiple was paid and whether you think it was too much, you have not followed the deal, you have read about it.
Expect next
- Was the price too high?
- If you were the buyer, what would you have worried about in diligence?
- Who else could have bought it?
Reported by candidates at Barclays (Investment Banking, New York, 2023); Evercore (Investment Banking, Menlo Park, 2025); Moelis & Company (Investment Banking, London, 2026); William Blair (Investment Banking, Atlanta, 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.