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
095What is 301 times 447?General AtlanticGeneralist · New York · 2026
Say this
134,547. Break 301 into 300 plus 1. Three hundred times 447 is 134,100, plus one more 447 gives 134,547.
Then walk it
- Decompose to the nearest round number. 301 is 300 plus 1, and 300 is easy because it is 3 times 100.
- 447 times 3 is 1,341. Times 100 is 134,100.
- Add the remaining 447: 134,547.
- Announce the decomposition before you compute, so the interviewer can follow and so a slip in arithmetic does not look like a failure of method.
- The same trick handles most of these: round one number, multiply, then correct. For 19 times 63, do 20 times 63 minus 63.
Where candidates lose it
Attempting long multiplication in your head and losing a digit. These are speed-and-method tests. Decompose out loud, keep one running total, and offer the sanity check that the answer should be a bit over 134,000.
Expect next
- What is 19 times 63?
- What is 1/7 as a decimal?
- What is the square root of 6,241?
Reported by candidates at General Atlantic (Generalist, 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.