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
045Based on the financials in front of you, would you advise this company to sell or not?Harris WilliamsInvestment Banking · Richmond · 2024Lincoln InternationalMergers and Acquisitions · New York · 2025
Say this
I would answer the question directly with a recommendation, then defend it on three axes: where the business is in its own trajectory, where the market is in its cycle, and what the owner actually wants.
Then walk it
- Sell into strength. If margins have just peaked, growth is decelerating, and the sector is trading at a cyclical high multiple, that is the moment. Buyers pay for the next three years, not the last three.
- Hold if there is a visible, fundable value-creation step the current owner can capture: a margin programme half done, a new facility about to come online, a contract about to be signed. Let the buyer pay for the result, not the plan.
- Then the owner's own position. A founder with all their net worth in one asset has a diversification reason to sell that has nothing to do with the multiple. A partial sale can solve that.
- Test the buyer universe before recommending a process. A thin buyer list means a weak auction and a weak price, whatever the financials say.
- Then commit. Something like: given decelerating growth, peak margins and a deep strategic buyer list, I would run a process now and target the strategics.
Where candidates lose it
Hedging. Middle-market bankers ask this to see whether you can make a recommendation on incomplete information. Saying 'it depends' and stopping is a fail. Pick a side, then name what would change your mind.
Expect next
- Who would be a dark horse buyer?
- Build me the buyer universe.
- What would change your recommendation?
Reported by candidates at Harris Williams (Investment Banking, Richmond, 2024); Lincoln International (Mergers and Acquisitions, New York, 2025). Source: Wall Street Oasis.
080How do you value an apple tree?Lincoln InternationalValuation · New York · 2023Rothschild & CoGeneralist · New York · 2026
Say this
As a finite-life cash-generating asset. Forecast the fruit it yields each year, price it, subtract the cost of harvesting, discount over the tree's productive life, and add any terminal value for the land or the timber.
Then walk it
- Cash flows: say 200 kilos of apples a year at a dollar a kilo, so $200 of revenue, less picking, water and treatment of maybe $80. Call it $120 a year.
- Shape the life curve. A young tree yields little, a mature tree plateaus, an old tree declines. So this is not a flat annuity; it ramps, plateaus for twenty or thirty years, then falls away.
- No perpetuity, because the tree dies. Forecast to the end of the productive life and add salvage, which is the firewood or the cleared land.
- Discount rate: this is a risky agricultural cash flow exposed to weather, disease and commodity price. Something well into double digits.
- Then the three cross-checks that make it a valuation answer rather than an arithmetic one. Market: what do orchards sell for per tree or per acre? Replacement: what does it cost to buy and grow a sapling to maturity, including the years of no yield? And the option value: if the land under it is worth more as building plots, the tree is worth negative, because you would pay to remove it. That last point is the answer they are listening for.
Where candidates lose it
Treating it as a perpetuity. It is a finite-life asset, which is the whole reason the question gets asked. And missing that the highest-value use might be cutting it down, which is the insight that the asset's value depends on the alternative use of what it sits on.
Expect next
- What if the land is worth more as development?
- How does this differ from valuing a mine?
- What discount rate would you use?
Reported by candidates at Lincoln International (Valuation, New York, 2023); Rothschild & Co (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.