How prepared were you? (those who got HF jobs)
Going through interviews and stressing myself out like crazy regarding how prepared I should be / how much more I still need to do. For those of you that successfully landed HF jobs I have the following questions:
- How many investment ideas did you prepare for the interviews?
- Did you build full 3 statement integrated quarterly models for each of your ideas?
- Did you write up each of your pitches as well?
- How did you study for modeling tests and exams? (any tickers that you think are good to practice on?)
- Any other advice that you may have to offer would be helpful!
I know there is a ton of stuff out there already, but I get worried my pitches are not sufficient enough for interviews, and am also worried about being in a timed modeling exercise.
Also if anyone recently had an interview or gave an interview, I would love to see some tickers that could be used in either a take home case study or an in person modeling test / exercise. Thank you!
Bump
Have an internship at one of the large MMs and didn't have to do any of those...getting a bit worried my summer is going to be packed learning all that lol
Nah FT hiring is very different - although I am shocked they didn't ask you to pitch a stock if you are working in a fundamental analyst capacity
Same to be honest; but I don't study finance or anything like that so maybe they assumed I have 0 XP deep diving a sector or stock. Still got business-theory questions and a "soft pitch"
Anyway good luck, don't want to hijack your thread.
Are you asking about interviewing for an analyst spot out of banking or more of a mid-level / senior analyst lateral? I recently interviewed as the latter and could speak to that process
Mid level analyst hire
So I actually found myself quite relaxed during my mid-level / senior analyst interviews and treated the experience like I was interviewing the target firm as well. I needed to really sniff out the sort of analyst the PM wanted to hire because "mid-level" can mean a lot of things. I wanted a seat with relatively good autonomy and little busy work as opposed to just processing requests from the PM - the "mid-level" in that circumstance meaning they just don't have to spend time training you basics. Speaking to other current and former analysts really helped me get a good picture for the day to day work and overall process; a poor process can be very frustrating even if you're performing. I was able to speak to company and sector coverage I was capable of day 1 and capacity to ramp other areas of interest...this was as much about trying to understand what the PM is trying to solve for and what I was capable of bringing to the team as it was being transparent about what I can and cannot do. I did have two write ups, one of which got me in the door and the other never came up, but over the course of my process probably touched on a dozen or so former trades / other situations I'd been involved in. This was more casual conversation and BSing about the market than giving pitches. I did a 2 hour case study in the office that was more focused on understanding my triage methodology as opposed to coming back with a fully baked idea. I didn't study at all for this, but if you're looking for a practice ticker I think FYBR / CHTR are setup for good case studies right now. My write ups don't include a fully baked three statement model but do link EBITDA -> FCF -> BS Change incl. W/C, so three statement-lite; I don't do more than this on my day to day.
My best advice, which I've learned from many prior interview iterations, is to be confident with your capabilities, style and process and seek a mutual fit. Its as much an interview for your benefit so don't cram yourself into a seat with a process or mandate you don't agree with just for the sake of a job - recognizing we're not all so fortunate to always be in a selective position, however.
per good tickers to play/model with, I'd recommend consumer names or even amusement park names. Target ones that have simple assumptions (like users, entrants, etc.) - remember profit at the end of the day comes down to price * quantity so the clearer a business model is with regard to this, the better and simpler it will be to model
Might be because I'm also interviewing for PE roles:
In terms of modeling tests, I found preparing yourself for 4 to 5-hour LBO model tests to be the best strategy since a lot of times when you do HF case studies, you build 3 statements, which is generally less complex than LBO models.
When I build 3-statement models for HF cases, haven't found much difficulty unless historical cash flows were really, really messed up.
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