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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074How would you invest 10 million pounds?Portfolio construction and adviceIntermediatesuperdaySchrodersAsset Management · London · 2023
Say this
My first move is to ask whose money it is and what it is for, because the answer is completely different for an endowment, a pension scheme and a private individual. If you want me to pick, I will assume a taxable individual with no immediate liability and a twenty-year horizon, and I will say so before I allocate a pound.
Then walk it
1. State the assumptions out loud: horizon, liquidity needs, tax status, base currency, existing wealth, and whether there is a spending requirement. Making them explicit is the whole test, because the interviewer wants to see if you build from a mandate.
2. Then a defensible allocation, roughly: 55 to 60 percent global equity, mostly indexed given the size and the cost saving available; 20 percent fixed income split between government bonds and investment grade credit; 10 percent real assets, listed infrastructure and property; 5 to 10 percent in cash and near-cash for two to three years of spending.
3. Justify the shape, not the numbers. The equity weight comes from the horizon, the bond weight is there to fund spending in a drawdown, and the real assets are for inflation exposure the bonds cannot provide.
4. Then implementation, which is where the size actually matters. At 10 million you get institutional share classes, so total cost can come in under 20 basis points on the passive core. Fee negotiation on that scale is worth more than most manager selection decisions.
5. Then risks and what would change my mind: currency exposure and whether to hedge the non-sterling bonds, concentration in US mega-caps in any global index today, and sequence risk if there is a spending requirement in the first five years.
6. And a deployment plan rather than a single date. Half now, the rest over three to six months, with a written rule so it happens regardless of how markets look at the time.
Where candidates lose it
Allocating immediately without asking what the money is for. The question is deliberately underspecified. But do not hide behind questions either — ask two or three, state your assumptions, and then commit to an actual allocation with reasons. Refusing to give numbers reads as evasion.
Expect next
- Now it is a pension scheme with liabilities in fifteen years. What changes?
- Would you hedge the currency?
- Active or passive, and why?
Reported by candidates at Schroders (Asset Management, London, 2023). 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