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
007What are some non-cash items you would find on the cash flow statement?Moody'sProject Finance · New York · 2018LazardInvestment Banking · New York · 2026
Say this
Depreciation and amortisation, stock-based compensation, deferred taxes, impairments and write-downs, unrealised gains or losses on investments, and equity income from unconsolidated affiliates.
Then walk it
- D&A is the big one and the one everyone names.
- Stock-based compensation is the one that matters most in practice, especially in tech, because it is a real cost to shareholders that never touches cash.
- Deferred tax movements, impairments and goodwill write-downs are all added back.
- Equity method income gets reversed out and replaced with the actual dividend received, because you only book cash you were paid.
- The judgement call is SBC. Adding it back and calling the result free cash flow overstates what shareholders actually keep, because the dilution is real.
Where candidates lose it
Listing D&A and stopping. Naming stock-based compensation, and then saying why treating it as a pure add-back is dishonest, is what separates a memoriser from someone who has actually thought about earnings quality.
Expect next
- Should stock-based compensation be added back in a DCF?
- How do you handle it when you are comparing a tech company to an industrial?
- What is the difference between deferred tax assets and liabilities?
Reported by candidates at Moody's (Project Finance, New York, 2018); Lazard (Investment Banking, New York, 2026). Source: Wall Street Oasis.
014Walk me through what OpenAI's income statement probably looks like.LazardInvestment Banking · San Francisco · 2026
Say this
Large and fast-growing revenue from subscriptions and API usage, a gross margin far below normal software because inference costs real compute, then enormous R&D and compute spend that puts operating income deeply negative.
Then walk it
- Revenue splits into consumer subscriptions, enterprise seats, and API consumption. The API line is usage-based, so it behaves more like a utility than like seat-based SaaS.
- Cost of revenue is the interesting part: every query costs GPU time. That is why gross margin sits well below the 75 to 85 percent you would expect from software.
- Below that, R&D dominates, and most of it is training compute plus a small number of very expensive people.
- Sales and marketing is unusually light for the growth rate, because distribution has been largely organic.
- So the shape is high growth, compressed gross margin, and a big operating loss funded by capital rather than cash flow. If I were valuing it I would care most about whether inference cost per query is falling faster than usage is rising.
Where candidates lose it
Treating it as generic SaaS with 80% gross margins. The entire point of the question is whether you understand that inference is a variable cost of goods sold. Name that and you have answered it, even if every number you guess is wrong.
Expect next
- How would you value it then?
- What would you need to believe for this to be worth its last round?
- Compare the business model to Microsoft's.
Reported by candidates at Lazard (Investment Banking, San Francisco, 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.