Mutual Fund Mastery interview preparation

Indian AMCs, distributors, registrars and the global fund houses that hire for the same skills — covering the trust structure, NAV and cut-off rules, SEBI scheme categorisation, debt risk and the Potential Risk Class matrix, passives, costs, taxation and distribution. Every question is either traced to a named firm from a public candidate report, or tagged at desk level when we could not trace it; we do not invent attributions.

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100 questions, mapped to the firms that asked them

Questions: 100
Traced to a firm: 32
Firms: 19
Updated: September 2026

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025How would you price a bond in today's market?Debt schemesIntermediatetechnicalJ.P. MorganGeneralist · Columbus · 2026
Say this
Discount every cash flow — the coupons and the principal — at a rate built from the risk-free curve for that maturity plus a credit spread for the issuer. Price is the sum of those present values. In practice you take the government security yield at the same tenor and add the spread the market is paying for that rating.
Then walk it
1. Mechanically: price equals the sum of coupon divided by one plus y to the power t, for each period, plus the face value discounted at the final period. A ten-year annual bond has eleven cash flows.
2. The discount rate is the part that requires judgement. Start with the G-sec yield for the same tenor — in India, the ten-year benchmark. Add a spread: a few basis points for a AAA PSU, substantially more for a AA corporate, and far more for anything below.
3. Rule of thumb for the intuition: if the coupon exceeds the market yield the bond trades above par, if it is below it trades at a discount, and at par the two are equal. State that and you have shown you understand the mechanism rather than the formula.
4. Then the adjustments. Accrued interest, so quote clean or dirty price and say which. Embedded options, so use yield to call if it is callable. Liquidity, because an Indian corporate bond that trades twice a month carries a real illiquidity premium over its matrix price.
5. For a mutual fund this is not a free choice. SEBI requires debt to be valued at the security-level prices published by CRISIL and ICRA, averaged, precisely so two AMCs cannot mark the same bond differently. Your own model is a cross-check, not the NAV.
6. Sanity check the answer with duration. If the ten-year yield moves 50 basis points and a bond with modified duration of 7 does not move about 3.5 percent, you have made an arithmetic error.
Where candidates lose it
Reaching for the formula and skipping how you pick the discount rate. The whole question is the discount rate. In an AMC seat, add the point that regulated valuation overrides your model — that is the answer a fund accounting or risk interviewer is waiting for.
Expect next
- Where do you get the credit spread from?
- Now tell me what happens to the price if rates move 50 basis points.
- How would you price it if the bond has not traded in a month?
Reported by candidates at J.P. Morgan (Generalist, Columbus, 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.

100 questions, mapped to the firms that asked them

Say this

Then walk it

Where candidates lose it

Expect next