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.
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.