Learn Investment Banking With No Experience

Trace the corporate life cycle from launch to decline, noting how sales, profits, and cash flow drive funding, growth strategies, and reinvention through venture capital, acquisitions, and leveraged buyouts.

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.

Learn how companies list on primary exchanges through an IPO or direct listing, and why they pursue secondary listings to access new investors and overseas markets.

Learn how debt vs equity structures finance assets, distinguish senior and subordinated debt, and explore high yield bonds and credit risk with examples of secured and unsecured issues.

Mezzanine financing layers unsecured subordinated debt with an equity kicker, not publicly traded, bridging funding between secured debt and equity for leveraged buyouts, acquisitions, or real estate.

Syndicated loans pool capital from multiple banks, sharing expertise and risk, with borrowers paying fees and a structure managed by MLA, bookrunners, trustees, including underwritten, best efforts, and club deals.

Explore project finance for infrastructure, using a special purpose vehicle with ring-fenced cash flows, sponsor equity, and long-term debt secured against project assets.

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 growth strategies through organic growth and acquisitions, weighing risks of overpaying and regulatory issues, and analyze vertical and horizontal acquisitions and related or unrelated diversification for synergies.

Investment banks guide clients through the M&A process, from strategic growth and target identification to valuation, due diligence, negotiation, financing, and post-completion integration.

Explore mergers and takeovers, including friendly and hostile offers, tender offers, proxy votes, and reverse takeovers, with examples from Dow Chemical and DuPont, WhatsApp and Facebook.

Explore hostile takeovers and the defenses companies use to deter them. Learn about poison pills, crown jewels, white knights, pac-man defense, greenmail, and golden parachutes.

Explore how acquisitions are financed through stock, cash, or a mix, including bank debt, bridge facilities, and leveraged finance structures with senior and junior tranches.

Understand investment banking division roles, including coverage teams advising on M&A, DCM, ECM, and structuring, and product groups executing deals across industry verticals and regions.

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 fixed income securities by detailing issuer, par value, and fixed coupon; learn how a 1000 par bond with an 8% coupon matures in 2025 and pays 1080.

Explain how issuers raise capital through debt and equity, focusing on governments and corporations, sovereign bonds like treasuries, and corporate bonds, including investment grade and high yield.

Identify how institutional investors dominate bond markets by pooling assets into funds and selecting government and corporate bonds, while retail investors participate in smaller, individual investments.

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.

Understand convertible bonds, including conversion ratio, par value, and when price triggers conversion, and explain callable bonds, whose issuer can redeem early to issue cheaper debt as rates fall.

Assess bond ratings from Standard and Poor's, Moody's, and Fitch to measure credit quality and risk. Use letter, number, and symbol scales to distinguish investment grade from high yield bonds.

Learn how bonds trade per 100 of par in secondary market, issued at par in primary market, with premiums or discounts driven by interest rates and credit ratings.

Explore how bond yields work, including current yield and yield to maturity, using par values, coupons, and discount or premium prices to compare investment returns.

Explore how the yield curve compares bond yields by maturity, revealing government and corporate credit spreads and signaling future rate moves, inflation expectations, and recession likelihood.

Explore how physical, capital, and derivative markets connect buyers and sellers, drive price via supply and demand, and manage risk through hedges, speculators, and arbitrage.

Explain how derivative contracts between two counterparties exchange cash flows based on changes in underlying assets. Include cash-settled and physically settled forms used for hedging.

Explore the four main derivative types: futures, forwards, options, and swaps, covering exchange trading, counterparty risk, option premiums, strike prices, and notional value cash flows.

Compare over-the-counter and exchange-traded derivatives, highlighting counterparty risk, collateral, forwards and swaps, and how exchanges set terms, require initial margin, and mark-to-market with variation margins.

Explore how bullish investors take a long position to profit from rising prices, and how bearish investors use short positions, borrowing assets and paying lending fees, including derivative contracts.

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.

Learn how futures contracts exchange cash flows based on an underlying asset, with long and short positions, daily settlement, and tick size moves on assets like the S&P 500 index.

Explain how a futures exchange clears trades to eliminate counterparty risk, using initial margin, daily mark-to-market, and variation margin to settle gains and losses.

Explore how forward contracts, traded over the counter and customized to their specific needs, differ from futures, including settlement, collateral, and counterparty risk.

Explore put options by examining premium, strike price, expiry, and exercise rights (European vs American), plus cash-settled versus physically settled payouts, using gold as the underlying.

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 main swap types, including interest rate swaps with a notional amount, currency swaps exchanging principals, credit default swaps, and commodity swaps hedging price risk.

Learn how a balance sheet classifies assets and financing into current and non-current categories. See the accounting equation—total assets equal total liabilities plus equity—with examples from MDA Inc.

Learn how accruals accounting drives the income statement and balance sheet, while the cash flow statement uses cash basis to classify operating, investing, and financing activities.

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.

Analyze trends in financial statements by comparing current year and previous year revenues to understand drivers like units sold, pricing, or product mix, and assess operating and net income.

Calculate gross margin by dividing gross income by revenues (revenues minus cost of goods sold) to express a percentage, then compare with prior years and industry peers to gauge profitability.

Grasp ebit and ebitda concepts, their margins, and how operating income relates to revenues. Learn to compare margins across time and peers using ebit and ebitda.

Learn how net income relates to revenues to form net margin, illustrated by MDA Inc.'s 4% margin (vs 4.1% prior year) and Nike's 10.3%, with tech sector typically highest margins.

Depreciation records the wear and obsolescence of tangible non-current assets over their useful life, allocating a non-cash expense to the income statement and signaling asset aging.

Learn how asset turnover measures revenue generated per dollar of capital employed to assess a business's efficiency, with real-world examples from MDA, Accenture, and IAG.

Compute inventory days by dividing the inventory balance by cost of goods sold and multiplying by 365, revealing MDA Inc. holding about 45 days and Volkswagen about 88 days.

Learn how receivables days measure the time between sales and cash collection, how to calculate them, and why minimizing them matters for cash flow, with industry examples.

Learn how payables days measure how long a company takes to pay suppliers, using MDA Inc's 34 days and industry benchmarks to manage cash flow and supplier relations.

Learn how inventories, accounts receivable, and accounts payable shape working capital, and analyze it as net working capital, the working capital cycle, and the funding gap.

Learn how to calculate ROE as net income divided by shareholders' equity, expressed as a percentage. See how margins and patents drive higher ROE across firms like GSK and Walmart.

Return on capital employed (roce) measures how well operating income uses capital to generate returns. Calculate by dividing ebit by capital employed and multiplying by 100.

Describe gearing as the ratio of debt to equity and to total funding, with MDA Inc and NYC examples. Discuss how cash flow and industry norms shape acceptable debt levels.

Explore leverage as the debt to ebitda ratio, how ebitda is calculated, and how net debt alters the leverage multiple, illustrated with MDA Inc. and industry examples.

Explore how interest cover uses operating income (EBIT) divided by interest expense to show a company’s ability to cover debt payments, with examples from Nike and GSK.

Understand the time value of money by comparing present value and future value, and apply 10% annual and semiannual compounding to calculate growth using the compounding factor.

Discover how discounted cash flow values assets by forecasting multiple future cash flows and discounting them to present value using the time value of money.

Explore the internal rate of return (IRR) as the yield from asset cash flows at a given price, using Excel IRR and the NPV relationship to evaluate investments.

Learn how a bond's price is the present value of its future cash flows, driven by coupon rate and yield, with premiums and discounts and semiannual adjustments.

Explain how bond yields move inversely with price for a three-year, 4% coupon bond, par when the coupon equals yield and yields of 5%, 4%, and 3% as prices change.

Learn how amortizing loans split payments into interest and principal, calculate annual and monthly repayments using discount factors and the PMT function in Excel, and verify a complete amortization schedule.

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.

Use statistics to describe price performance, including direction, returns, drawdown, and volatility. Explore how the S&P 500 and Zoom relate, with correlation and volatility patterns during Covid.

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.

Analyze Google and the S&P 500 using correlation and beta; examine weekly returns with scatter plots and a line of best fit to reveal a 0.763 correlation and 0.818 beta.

Learn how the capital asset pricing model uses beta, risk-free rate, and equity risk premium to compute the cost of equity and explain risk-return tradeoffs for stocks.

Explore how normally distributed returns help investors estimate the likelihood of daily stock moves, using mean, standard deviation, and the 68-95-99.7 rule, with examples from Zoom and the S&P 500.

Explore how fat tails and skew shape asset returns, revealing extreme events beyond the normal distribution; investors favor positive skew for rare large profits and hedge negative skew losses.

Explore derivative contracts and how they derive cash flows from underlying assets or indices. Learn about futures, forwards, options, and swaps and how cash flows depend on price movements.

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.

Compare arithmetic and logarithmic returns to show arithmetic returns are not additive over time, while log returns are. Use basis points and the LN function in Excel to assess volatility.

The binomial pricing model, one of three major models alongside Black-Scholes and Monte Carlo, uses up/down steps to compute option value from spot, strike, probabilities, and discount rate.

Learn how option premiums arise from expected payoffs under the Black-Scholes framework, using the normal distribution of log returns to price european calls and puts.

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.

Explore how a market connects buyers and sellers to trade securities and derivatives, from primary and secondary markets to OTC deals, with players like banks, exchanges, brokers, and regulators.

Explore how traders initiate trades to speculate, accumulate income, or hedge risk using long and short positions, dividends, bonds, and four derivative contracts: futures, forwards, options, swaps.

Learn how data management drives the trade lifecycle by capturing and maintaining accurate data, executing KYC three-step verification, and enabling risk, settlement, and performance teams to use and publish data.

Understand how front office desks execute client orders by matching buys and sells on exchanges. Learn how market makers and bid-ask spreads support liquidity, with ecns and ipos considerations.

Understand over-the-counter markets as a decentralized network where market makers quote bids and offers, enabling large institutional trades with negotiated terms and collateral to manage counterparty risk.

Capture and confirm trades by recording front office deals in the institution's records, then compare counterparties to ensure security, volume, price, and counterparty match, resolving discrepancies or canceling as needed.

Learn how custodians safeguard assets and facilitate settlements for physical trades, while clearing houses and brokers settle derivatives through novation and margin, ensuring counterparty risk is managed.

Learn how trades clear and settle through custodians and central securities depositories, with dvp, rvp, and cfds, and how icsd structures shape settlement cycles.

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.

Learn how fund accounting tracks investments and calculates the fund's net asset value daily, including cash management, subscriptions, redemptions, and cooperation with brokers and auditors.

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.

Explore how investment banks leverage technology to accelerate trade execution and settlement, using co-location, APIs, STP, cloud, robotic process automation, and distributed ledger technology for almost instantaneous straight-through processing.

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.

Explore the Presco supplies balance sheet template, with assets at the top and liabilities plus equity beneath, reflecting the accounting equation and linking to income and cash flow statements.

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.

Build an excel financial model to calculate gross profit and cost of sales for Presco supplies, using €6.6 million annual sales and 75% cost of sales, with named ranges.

Calculate operating expenses for Presco supplies, including salaries, marketing, rent, and depreciation. Use named ranges to compute salaries and reference them in the income statement, while ensuring balance sheet accuracy.

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.

Learn to calculate earnings after tax by linking interest expense, tax, and tax payable across income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow in a Presco supplies model.

Analyze income statement ratios to assess profitability, liquidity, and solvency, using gross margin, EBIT margin, EBITDA margin (a proxy for operating cash flow), and interest coverage.

Hide unused rows and columns in the income statement after completing the ratio analysis to create a cleaner, more professional model, using shortcuts like Ctrl+Shift+Down and Ctrl+Shift+Right.

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.

Model €1 million debt and €500,000 equity financing to complete the balance sheet and cash flow statement, updating debt repaid (€125,000) and cash flows with Excel shortcuts for named ranges.

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.

Explore cash flow analysis for debt service, calculating cash flow available for debt service from net operating cash flow minus interest, and assess debt obligations via EBITDA and the DSCR.

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.

Begin an accelerated learning journey in investment banking by mastering the main points in each module, then applying them to nail your interview and transform your career.

Discover how marginal gains boost your interview performance by making small improvements across many areas—diet, fabrics, massage gels, sleep, and core interview skills—to outpace rivals.

Boil the interview to one question: why are you the best fit for this organization today, and why is this role right for you now, given culture, growth, and environment.

Discover your unique offering by identifying inherent strengths—reliability, listening, humor, a love of learning, critical evaluation, and attention to detail—and learn to convey them effectively in an interview.

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.

Visualize and rehearse your interview performance using a movie-set scenario, building vivid scenes of your presence, body language, and a concise self-introduction to boost mental readiness.

Explore the three brain levels: the reptilian lizard brain, the limbic system, and the neocortex, and learn to override fear in interviews by treating challenges as performances.

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.

Discover how halo bias affects your mood and how to counter it by noting five things that went well and practicing daily gratitude before an interview.

Leverage halo bias by warm icebreakers, positive anecdotes, and company compliments, then build common ground through shared experiences to signal you are a friend, not a threat.

Explore confirmation bias, a tendency to favor evidence that supports existing beliefs, from pink hair to neck tattoos. Balance adapting to culture with staying true to yourself and customer relationships.

Identify 3–5 adjectives to describe yourself in an investment banking interview, learn from role models, and apply method acting to project authenticity with confidence, professionalism, and care.

Explore how what you wear signals professionalism and shapes impressions; assess stereotypes, and learn to align your personal style with an organization’s culture while staying authentic.

Learn to answer 'tell me about yourself' by choosing 2–3 role-relevant adjectives, maintaining consistency to signal authenticity, and avoiding oversharing while guiding what the interviewer remembers.

Identify and review the most important concepts beforehand, connect questions to what you know, and mitigate the recency effect to share your best experiences.

Understand validity and reliability as hiring measures that predict job performance and ensure consistent results across assessors, with practical interview examples.

Compare unstructured and structured competency-based interviews, highlighting validity, reliability, and biases. Learn strategies to excel in either interview type by focusing on competencies that predict job performance.

Understand the assessor's objective in unstructured interviews and influence their emotion through positive body language to trigger the halo effect while showcasing essential skills and CV achievements.