How to stop blanking on technicals during interviews?

You just have to learn it. Nothing we say will magically help you. You need to learn this yourself.

to gain conceptual understanding you have to run different versions of the same qs on the guide. just ask chat to spit some out, all structured differently. don't just solve for it in ur head, verbally walk through it. you shouldn't be getting tripped over depreciation questions

You answered the questions yourself. Understanding the the concept will allow you to handle curve balls

IMO based on what you said, you kinda have to start from scratch. Lock yourself in a room and think about the concepts behind the guide Qs until you understand it. Use the interview banks you can find everywhere now to see if you can answer all of them. See where you mess up and why. It’s like a regular class at school, not drivers ed where you just memorize shit

Pen and paper method is underrated—spend the time to work out the flow of the fundamental questions on paper, after that curveballs and different scenarios make a lot more sense on the fly

They ask those specific questions to sniff out exactly what you're doing. You’re getting exposed because you know the definitions but not the logic. You need to actually break the model to understand it.

I switched to using Cook’d for prep bc it forces me to run the sims and build the mechanics rather than just reading about them. Once you’ve actually seen the cash balance change because you tweaked the tax rate, the curveballs kinda just become logic puzzles.