PE FIRM in sights

hello monkeys, i am an engineering student (no finance background) and will be doing an interview soon with a PE firm. could you please recommend a book or two that covers the type of modeling that is needed in PE. I cant afford to do the Wall Street Prep course so preferably text books or free online resources would be wonderful.

also what kind of modeling should one know for a job in PE?

  1. Financial Statement Modeling
  2. Valuation Modeling
  3. DCF, LBO, M&A Modeling
  4. Comps Modeling

Are all 4 above relevant to PE?

Thanks guys.

5 Comments
Best Response

I agree that Rosenbaum et al is a great book on the topic and definitely worth the buy.

Alternatively, a free resource for classical valuation is the website of Prof. Damodaran. His books are posted online and while the formatting isn't awesome, it's a great free of charge service: http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/

However this won't cover the actual process of modeling while Rosenbaum at least deals with the basics. Obviously the best would be to get your hands on an analyst training book from an investment bank - maybe you have some really good contacts? Or you can get a valuation model to learn from observing it and just some trial and error.

Regarding the required modeling skills, I'm not sure what you mean with 2) since 3)+4) basically deals with the topic of valuation... Obviously 1) is necessary, as is 3). From the PE firm I interned with I can say that 4) was only used rarely and the comps method was mostly used to just get some idea of how the DCF results compared to them.

 

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