Modeling resources

Hi all, wondering if anyone has any recommendations about a free modeling course/videos/content that anyone has used and found helpful in the past. Starting an internship in a few weeks and want to brush up. Thanks!

 
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If you made it through the interviews, you should be fine.

What's most important IMO is understanding the underlying accounting and finance concepts. A financial model really just reflects these basic mechanisms in a structured way; that's all. If you don't understand what happens in the three financial statements if an asset depreciates or you buy assets using debt, then how on earth do you want to model it? You can't, no matter how many fancy Excel tricks you know. It still amazes me how many applicants fail here.

Anyway, the standard resource for M&A that is Rosenbaum/Pearl; if you intern in a different field (say ECM/DCM/S&T), you might want to brush up on some more specific capital market skills too, but you get the point.

For the actual modeling, I personally think that F1F9's free email course is a nice intro. They teach you how to set up a model using the FAST standard. The FAST standard is really just a set of rules that you can also download and read through (which I recommend after getting used to it).

As I said, I work in project finance. We usually build our models like that. For M&A, I have seen equivalently beautifully structured models, but also some nasty models. Maybe someone else can chime in on how you M&A guys do it.

 

Thanks, really appreciate it. I have good understanding that helped through the interviews but want to be able to set myself apart before getting there. Will definitely look into your recommendations!

 

I used ME to prep for some of my banking associate interviews and it's been invaluable to me on the job. We haven't had any sort of formal discussion internally, but I'm going to suggest this to a few peers as part of summer training

 

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