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
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.