Learn Investment Banking With No Experience

An initial public offering, or flotation, sells equity to investors while enabling shareholders to monetize holdings; issuers raise capital, and underwriters and bookbuild pricing determine demand and set the price.

Explore how an initial public offering raises capital by offering stock on a public exchange, guided by equity capital markets through due diligence, prospectus filing, roadshows, pricing, and stabilization.

Aligns the issue price with demand through a lead bookrunner guided book building process. Distributes securities across investors via roadshows and price range analysis to maximize issuer and investor value.

Explore how companies manage borrowing costs through fixed and floating rate debt, and use hedging tools like FRA and interest rate swaps to lock in rates.

Explore how companies raise capital through equity and debt, including private and public markets, shares, dividends, IPOs, and bonds with coupon payments and maturity.

Explore bond types by coupons—fixed (plain vanilla), zero, floating rate, and index linked—covering par value, coupon calculations (annual and semiannual), LIBOR, inflation, and CPI adjustments.

Explore how hedgers use derivatives to smooth profits against interest, currency, and commodity risk. See how speculators take long or short positions to profit, and how arbitragers exploit price discrepancies.

Explore how interest rate swaps hedge risk by exchanging fixed and floating cash flows in a plain vanilla, over-the-counter contract. Identify payer and receiver swaps and LIBOR-based payments.

Explore the three cash flow types—operating, investing, and financing—and learn how direct and indirect methods compute operating cash flow, including depreciation and changes in assets and liabilities.

Apply discounted cash flow analysis to value a share by forecasting five to ten years of cash flows, computing the terminal value with WACC, and deriving equity value.

Calculate volatility by measuring how far daily returns deviate from mean, square and average the differences with n-1 to get variance, then take the square root to obtain standard deviation.

Compute forward prices by adding spot price and carry costs, minus carry returns, to hedge price risk for future delivery in gold or equities, indicating contango or backwardation.

Explore how investment banks coordinate issuers, buyers, and sellers from the primary market to the secondary market, connecting institutional and retail investors through brokers, custodians, and clearinghouses.

Automate trade entry to reduce failed trades and improve straight through processing from execution to settlement. Reconcile accounts and data regularly to prevent discrepancies and lower costs.

Explore how banks manage two portfolios, the banking book and the trading book, with hedging, long and short positions, and the risks of leverage, rogue trading, and losses.

Explore marking to market for trading book assets at current fair value under GAAP and IFRS, and distinguish level one, two, and three valuations.

Learn how risk, compliance, and internal audit safeguard the trade lifecycle through onboarding instruments and counterparties, limit exposures, and maintain market integrity under the three lines of defence.

Build the income statement for Presco supplies by calculating gross profit from sales minus cost of sales, then determine EBIT, tax, and net profit, with retained earnings using corkscrew calculation.

Use the indirect method to build the cash flow statement, starting with EBIT and depreciation to EBITDA, and include operating, investing, and financing cash flows with changes in working capital.

Examine depreciation of non-current assets using the straight-line method to compute depreciation expense, NBV, and CapEx effects on the income statement and balance sheet.

Compute inventory, receivables, and payables to finalize Presco supplies' balance sheet and cash flow, showing how inventory held varies with sales and affects working capital.

Calculate working capital by tracing payables based on cost of sales with 30-day terms, and fix balance sheet errors using Excel abs across income statement and cash flow statements.

Assess balance sheet ratios to evaluate capital deployment and liquidity, including debt, operating working capital, capital employed, ROE, return on capital employed, asset turnover, and net debt to EBITDA.

Master investment banking interviews with an edge by mastering core interview skills, neuroscience insights, and advanced techniques to secure a job offer, not just answer questions.

Leverage neuroscience to gain a behavioral and learning edge, turning nerves into a positive impression and aligning with the interviewer's neurological state and decision making to land the job offer.

Learn how first impressions shape trust in interviews and professional settings, and master authentic presence to influence how others feel about you.

Watch a film scene with a prominent character, observe dress, movement, speech, and body language to form first impressions and intuition, then discuss how they might work in meetings.

Explore how the lizard brain forms first impressions in interviews and triggers halo and horn biases. Learn how the reticular activating system highlights bias and how to overcome biased judgments.