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
053A PE firm bought a company for $1,000 and sold it for $1,000. How did they make money?TD SecuritiesInvestment Banking · Toronto · 2026
Say this
Debt paydown. Enterprise value did not move, but the debt inside it shrank, so the equity slice grew. Buy at $1,000 with $700 of debt and $300 of equity; if cash flow repays $300 of debt, you sell at $1,000 and the equity is now $600.
Then walk it
- Entry: $1,000 enterprise value, $700 debt, $300 sponsor equity.
- Over the hold, the company's free cash flow after interest pays down $300 of debt. Nothing else changes.
- Exit: $1,000 enterprise value less $400 remaining debt equals $600 of equity.
- That is 2.0 times the money. Over five years it is roughly a 15 percent IRR.
- Other routes to the same outcome: a dividend recap that returned cash mid-hold, or selling a division and returning proceeds while the remaining business held its value. Both put money in the sponsor's pocket without any change in headline enterprise value.
Where candidates lose it
Freezing because the entry and exit prices match. The question is testing whether you understand that the sponsor owns the equity, not the enterprise. Use round numbers immediately and show the two balance sheets.
Expect next
- What IRR is that over five years?
- What if they had used no debt at all?
- How else could they have made money at a flat exit?
Reported by candidates at TD Securities (Investment Banking, Toronto, 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.