Where the material comes from

Breaking Into Wall Street¹

A paid course site with a free knowledge base beside it. Its IB Interview Guide is sold as 578+ pages of tutorials, sample answers and quizzes with 17 Excel case studies. The bulk of the generalist technical questions in this site’s bank trace back to its accounting, valuation, equity and enterprise value, merger model and LBO guides.

Mergers & Inquisitions, and why it counts as one voice with the above^1,2

Free long-form articles on recruiting, groups, cities and pay, cited throughout this site. Its founder, Brian DeChesare, also founded Breaking Into Wall Street, and the site describes itself as backed by it, so the two are one voice with two storefronts. That is why claims here that rest on either are paired with an independent source wherever one could be found.

Wall Street Prep³

A free knowledge base of articles and interview guides, alongside paid modelling programmes - a Premium and a Basic package - and certificates run with Wharton and Columbia. Its coverage of the generalist interview overlaps with the two above, with more emphasis on building models; it is the independent second source on several pages here.

A German practitioner’s guide, from 2016⁴

Florian P. Meyer’s Praxisratgeber Investment Banking Interviews is a German-language guide by a Frankfurt banker with more than 500 questions, graded on a five-level difficulty scale, and unusually strong on ECM, DCM and restructuring where most guides stop at M&A. It is the second, independent voice on several pages here - on the interview day, the divisions and the common questions - and it is the source for how German interviews differ. It was printed in 2016, so its firm lists and figures are not used here without a current, dated source beside them; the tiers page shows how much of its list has since changed hands.

Rosenbaum and Pearl, the textbook⁵

Investment Banking: Valuation, LBOs, M&A, and IPOs, by two practitioners, walks through comparable companies, precedent transactions, the DCF, the LBO, M&A analysis and, since the third edition of March 2020, IPOs, step by step and with model templates. Its publisher says it is used in more than 200 universities. It is the slow, complete version of what the guides compress.

Cleary Gottlieb’s capital markets handbook⁶

A practitioner’s reference published on 14 April 2026 by partners in the firm’s London capital markets team, covering US securities law, publicity restrictions, market sounding, underwriting agreements and financial statements in ECM and DCM deals. It is written for the whole deal team, bankers included, and is where the capital markets questions in the bank are grounded.

The SEC’s beginners’ guide to financial statements⁷

A short, free primer from the US regulator: what the balance sheet, income statement and cash flow statement each show, why the footnotes and the management discussion matter, and the basic ratios. Written for investors rather than candidates, which is exactly why it is useful - it explains the statements without the interview shortcuts.

The IFRS standards themselves⁸

The IFRS Foundation publishes the standards themselves, each with its scope and the date it takes effect, which is the place to settle an accounting argument rather than a guide's paraphrase. The theory pages on the financial statements cite them by number.

The primary sources worth bookmarking^9-12

For anything that moves, go past the guides to the source: the ECB, Bank of England and Federal Reserve pages for policy rates, the ION Analytics (Mergermarket and Dealogic) releases for league tables, and each bank’s own careers pages for programme dates. Every dated figure on this site links to one of these.

Damodaran’s data pages¹³

Aswath Damodaran, a professor at NYU Stern, publishes free datasets once a year. His country table, last updated 5 January 2026, gives each country's rating, default spread and a total equity risk premium - 4.23% for Aaa-rated markets such as Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland, 5.01% for France and the UK, 6.69% for Italy. It is where a cost-of-capital answer can come from something other than a guess.

eFinancialCareers, and what its pay figures rest on^14,15

The finance jobs site's news section is the fastest place to read about hiring and pay, and it is cited on several pages here. Its pay figures usually come from somebody else's survey - the two cited on this site rest on a Pretraga Partners survey and a Litquidity survey - so read each one for whose survey it is and how many people answered.

The statistics offices, for anything about inflation^16,17

Eurostat publishes euro-area inflation twice a month - a flash estimate at the end of the month and the full figure mid-month - and the ONS publishes UK inflation monthly. Both give the next release date on the page, which tells you when a figure you memorised stops being current.