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
040Would Blackstone or Nike pay more to acquire Adidas, and why?NomuraInvestment Banking · New York · 2026
Say this
Nike, on economics. A strategic buyer can pay for synergies a sponsor cannot: overlapping supply chain, shared distribution and marketing scale. Blackstone only has financial engineering and whatever operational improvement it can drive alone.
Then walk it
- Nike's ceiling is intrinsic value plus synergies. Procurement, logistics, retail footprint and back office overlap are all real, so the synergy pool is large.
- Blackstone's ceiling is whatever price still clears its target return, typically a low-to-mid twenties IRR over five years. No synergies, so the value has to come from leverage, multiple expansion and operational improvement.
- So on paper the strategic wins, and that is the standard answer.
- But the deal would never happen for Nike. Combining the two largest athletic brands would be blocked on competition grounds in every major market. A buyer who cannot close cannot be the highest bidder in any real sense.
- So the honest answer is: Nike can pay more and will not be allowed to; Blackstone can actually transact. And a sponsor can sometimes win anyway on speed, certainty and no antitrust review, which is why sellers do not always take the highest nominal number.
Where candidates lose it
Giving the textbook 'strategics pay more' answer without noticing that this particular pairing is an antitrust impossibility. The firm names were chosen deliberately. Spotting that is the whole test.
Expect next
- Who typically pays more, a sponsor or a strategic?
- Who would be a realistic buyer then?
- When does a seller take the lower bid?
Reported by candidates at Nomura (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.