Hit Me With a Knowledge Stick

for the first part of your question: it's because there's so much competition that banks can afford to grill you on technicals; they can have their cake and eat it too.

for part two: search.

If only I didn't have school.. Sadly, I would probably know so much more relative to my field of interest. So backwards.

Well, partly it is because all these interview guides floating around on college campuses, bankers know it, and they know what are in those guides. So they expect you know everything in those guides and they will ask more out of box questions to see if you just memorized the answers.

That makes sense. Do you guys know any material where I could learn conceptual things like "how interest rates affect bond prices" or "how the disposal of an asset and a purchase of another asset affect all three financial statements"... Things along those lines. I am having trouble learning the answers to questions like this without learning it in class or just doing a Google search. Any tips?

Whats wrong with doing a quick google search??

Nothing is wrong with that, but think about it.. You have to know what you're looking for in order to do a Google search. For me, a big part of the issue is I do not know what I want to know. A lot of these Finance topics are unknowns to me thus far. So I was looking for something along the lines of a book or article or some sort of text that covers a wide range of topics and explains them thoroughly

What is a balance sheet?

^haha. OP take as many accounting/finance classes as you can before recruiting, and I used the M&I guide which was great

there's also a book called investment banking (rosenbaum, pearl) and you can probably find it online somewhere as a pdf. one of the interview guides and that book should be enough imo

can we talk about how "hit me with a knowledge stick" is very poorly worded and has immediate sexual implications

for those questions you mentioned (interest rates and how they affect bond prices, how disposal or acquisition of an asset flows across the financial statements): the answers are literally everywhere on the web.

for starters, check out the WSO guides. check out Mergers and Inquisitions too, and their Breaking into Wall Street guides. and as other people have mentioned: learn to use Google. Macabacus is also a good resource.

If you really want to learn this stuff, also read accounting/corporate finance textbooks and CFA study books. finally, "memorizing" isn't necessarily the best thing to do... just try to understand all of the conceptual stuff and you should be able to figure everything out without excess memorization. my hardest questions were case-study type questions that you can't memorize the answers for anyways...

if you really want to get a job in this field and can't be fucked to at least look up shit on your own then you are in for a rude awakening. it's one thing to look up shit and bring specific questions to the table. it's another thing to go WAHH GIVE ME ANSWERS

If you fear technical questions, purchase the interview guide from Mergers & Inquisitions. Also, have a look at the FAQ sections on websites likes ibankingfaq.com.

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You can literally learn all the questions by memorizing the "Basic" section of the M&I guides. That's it. If your buddies aren't getting offers because they don't know the technicals, they're just not working hard enough to learn them. I've gotten maybe 1 question, ever, that wasn't covered there.

Also, the Vault guides are terrible.

Thanks for the input

I was stuck on technical interviews this year and humble_dude has it about right. Started off with "easy" questions from the guides to see if they knew them and worked my way up to much harder questions to see if someone just memorized answers.

However, I kept it all within the concepts that the guides/questions went over. No one expects an intern to be a finance genius but if they read the guides, its expected that you learned something. I'd say thats pretty standard.

Didn't have time to read all the previous responses but I'm sure they mentioned using the guides. I made notecards for a couple hundred questions from the BIWS guide and although it took me like 10 hours stretched out over a weekend do write them all I was never worried about technicals going into any interview after wrote/studied them and then realized how spot on those guides are with regard to the most popular technical questions every firms asks.

Don't let the "idea" of technical questions overwhelm you and don't try to read a million different text books and websites trying to gather information for every possible subject that might be touched on during technical interviews. Seriously just spend $100 and get the BIWS interview guide. It covers everything, it has very plain and simple yet thorough explanations and its very well organized. It also has a sections that covers fit and qualitative interview questions. It includes everything you need to know and does not include any unnecessary fillers ... its all pertinent info.