Technicals Studying Strategy
For those who successfully recruited for investment banking, what strategy did you use to tackle the technicals? I'm currently reading the BIWS guides but not sure what I should do in terms of creating a study schedule or coming up with other methods to learn the concepts efficiently.
What successful strategies have you guys used?
If you rely strictly on the BIWS guide, you will have trouble remembering certain things when pressured during the interview. If you take the time to go through modeling videos, understand the concepts, thinking about "Why", you will walk into your super day confident.
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Echoing the other commenters - before I knew accounting, I just memorized all of the steps in a DCF. I had no clue what any of the shit I was saying meant. I also memorized the "Walk me through how $10 of depreciation flows through the three financial statements." If someone asked me "How does a $57 change in depreciation change the three financial statements?"
I would have frozen. I've since learned the underlying concepts and it's also made learning everything else much easier. Someone said to me the other day "Accounting is the language of finance." and that really resonated with me. Would suggest using that as your foundation for your learning.
First thing I would do would get the WSP accounting crash course. It provides videos and a PDF of all the slides in the videos. This is more than enough for any IB interview. Next, I would go through the Vault Guide. The Vault Guide is pretty basic and, as long as you understand the accounting from the WSP crash course, you should be able to answer at least 80% of technical questions in IB interviews. After that, I would go through the 400 Guide. This has more questions and goes more in-depth than the Vault Guide. Anything that you still feel uncomfortable with (whether it be DCF, accounting, valuation, etc.) I would get the specific topic guides from BIWS. They have an in-depth PDF guide for all the major topics that come up in interviews.
This is the strategy that I used (in that order) and I went from being extremely unprepared to feeling confident in all my interviews and never having a problem with any technicals (other than with a restructuring firm). I never did any modeling because I had a sound understanding from doing the above.
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