Finance Insights & Interview Practice

This is a knowledge base for people applying to finance internships and graduate schemes in the UK. It has two halves and they are meant to be used together.

Paths answers the question "what is this job, actually?" You start at a broad group such as Investment Banking, pick a division inside it such as M&A or Leveraged Finance, and get the same twelve things for every division: what the work is, the lifecycle of a deal or a trade, what an analyst does versus an associate versus an MD, the knowledge and tools the role needs, how the job differs at a bulge bracket compared with a boutique, the interview questions and what a good answer contains, where people go afterwards, and what it pays.

Core Skills is the material that every division assumes and none of them teaches. Accounting, valuation, credit, rates and bond maths, modelling in Excel, how to build a stock pitch, and how to keep a live view on markets. Division pages link into these rather than repeating them, so when something here is corrected it is corrected everywhere.

How the pages are written

Written from zero, so a first year with no finance background can follow. Anything that assumes nothing sits in a Foundations box you can collapse, and there is a button in the header that collapses all of them at once. If you already know what a balance sheet is, hit it and the page reduces to the parts you do not know.

Worked examples are boxed and use real arithmetic you can check. Interview framings are boxed separately, because knowing a thing and being able to say it under pressure in ninety seconds are different skills and the second one is what gets tested.

Specific, contested or dated claims carry a source. Settled mechanics, such as how a discounted cash flow works, are just explained. Pay figures are ranges from named surveys with the date they were published, held in one file so they can be refreshed in one place, and no pay figure anywhere is stated as fact.