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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Question bank

100 questions, mapped to the firms that asked them

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

Showing 1–1 of 1 · filtered from 100Clear filters

037What's the difference between an ETF and a mutual fund?Index funds and ETFsCorephone / first roundVanguardGeneralist · Malvern · 2026PIMCOCompliance · Los Angeles · 2024
Say this
An ETF is a mutual fund whose units trade on an exchange. You buy it from another investor at a market price during market hours; with a regular open-ended fund you transact with the AMC at end-of-day NAV. That one structural difference drives everything else — cost, tax, minimum size and how liquidity actually works.
Then walk it
1. Dealing: ETF units trade intraday at whatever the market pays, which can be above or below the underlying value. A mutual fund transacts at one NAV struck after the close, the same price for everybody that day.
2. You need a demat account and a broker for an ETF. That is a real barrier in India and the main reason index funds, not ETFs, dominate retail passive money here while the reverse is true in the US.
3. Creation and redemption happens only in large blocks with authorised participants, so the AMC never has to sell portfolio securities to fund a retail exit. In an open-ended fund, a redemption wave forces the manager to sell.
4. Cost: ETFs are usually cheaper because there is no registrar servicing individual folios, but the investor pays brokerage, the bid-ask spread and any premium or discount to fair value. The headline TER understates the true cost of owning a thinly traded ETF.
5. In the US, the in-kind redemption mechanism also gives ETFs a real capital gains advantage. In India that advantage does not exist, because the fund itself is a pass-through either way — worth saying, as it separates someone who understands the structures from someone repeating a US article.
6. Which I would recommend depends entirely on the investor: an SIP investor should use an index fund, and an institution putting 50 crore to work in one day should use the ETF.
Where candidates lose it
Saying an ETF is passive and a mutual fund is active. That is a common conflation and it is wrong — the difference is the trading wrapper, not the strategy. There are active ETFs and passive index mutual funds. Lead with the exchange-traded structure.
Expect next
- Why do Indian retail investors use index funds rather than ETFs?
- Explain the creation and redemption mechanism.
- When would an ETF trade at a discount to its fair value?
Reported by candidates at Vanguard (Generalist, Malvern, 2026); PIMCO (Compliance, Los Angeles, 2024). 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