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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076Go over the valuation methods you would use on a stock you were considering for the fund.Portfolio construction and adviceIntermediatetechnicalInvescoAsset Management · New York · 2023
Say this
Three families: intrinsic, relative and asset-based. A discounted cash flow for what the business is worth on its own cash generation, trading comparables and precedent transactions for what the market is paying for similar businesses, and net asset or sum-of-the-parts where the assets are the story. I would triangulate rather than pick one.
Then walk it
1. DCF: project free cash flow, discount at the weighted average cost of capital, add a terminal value. It is the only method that is theoretically right and the one most sensitive to assumptions — typically 60 to 75 percent of the value sits in the terminal value, which is why I run it as a range.
2. Trading comparables: EV to EBITDA, price to earnings, EV to sales for pre-profit businesses, price to book for financials. Fast, market-based, and circular — if the whole sector is mispriced, comps tell you nothing.
3. Precedent transactions: what acquirers paid, which embeds a control premium and so sits above trading multiples. Useful for a floor in a takeover situation, weak for a minority stake.
4. Special cases matter in India. Banks and NBFCs go on price to book against return on equity, because cash flow is not meaningful for a lender. Conglomerates and holding companies need a sum of the parts with an explicit holding-company discount, which in India has run at 30 to 60 percent.
5. Then the reverse DCF, which is the technique I would actually lead with in a fund context: take today's price and solve for the growth and margin the market is assuming. It turns valuation from a forecast into a question about whether the embedded expectation is plausible.
6. And the discipline: a valuation is a range with a stated set of assumptions, not a target price. If the answer changes from 900 to 1,400 on a one percent change in terminal growth, the honest output is that the stock is not valuable enough to own.
Where candidates lose it
Listing DCF, comps and precedents mechanically without saying which you would weight and why. In an asset management seat, mentioning the reverse DCF and the price-to-book treatment for financials is what shows you have valued something rather than read about valuing something.
Expect next
- Which method would you weight most for an Indian private bank?
- How do you handle the terminal value?
- What is a reverse DCF and why would you use it?
Reported by candidates at Invesco (Asset Management, New York, 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