Top 10 Free Resources for Investment Banking Interview Questions in 2026
- Stephen Turban
- Apr 28
- 8 min read
Updated: Apr 30
Chances are, you have an investment banking interview coming up and you need practice questions. Or you’re a freshman/sophomore getting prepped for recruiting and trying to figure out where to start. Either way, it’s not worth spending $200 on a prep course to get what you need.
In reality, candidates who get offers in IB are not the ones who bought expensive prep courses. Rather, they started early, practiced out loud, and knew exactly what each firm was going to ask before they entered the room. You can do all of that for free. This list tells you where to go.
As an IB analyst who received multiple offers at bulge bracket and elite boutique banks, and has mentored students who have gone on to receive offers at Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Evercore: these are the best resources I and my students have used to receive offers.
Are free resources actually enough for IB interviews?
For the most part, yes.
Most technical questions you face in a first round interview are not secret. They are well documented, widely available and honestly, very predictable. What really separates candidates is the quality of practice.
What Investment Banking Interview Questions should I actually prep for?
In almost every IB interview, at every bank, will test the same core areas: accounting, valuation methodologies, and M&A/LBO questions. Beyond that, it’s a matter of having a sharp “Why finance/tell me about yourself” story and a specific answer to “Why this firm?” The resources below will cover all of it.
This was the resource recommended to me during my freshmen year by my club president (who now works at Evercore) and the resource I used most during my freshmen year to build out my conceptual knowledge on Investment Banking. The platform has over 1,800 technical and behavioral questions, including more than 1,200 real questions reported directly from interviews at Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Evercore, Moelis, and others. Questions are tagged by bank, group, interview round, and office.
That level of specificity is what makes IB Vine different from everything else on this list. If you are preparing for a LevFin first round at Goldman Sach's New York office, you can filter exactly that. Most free resources give you a generic question bank, but IB Vine gives you what your specific interviewer is likely to ask.
The free tier includes a sample of the question bank plus 60 free minutes of IB Mock, their voice-to-voice AI mock interview feature, with no credit card required. The UI is flashcard-style and built for active recall, which matters more than most candidates realize. You are going to be drilling these questions for weeks. A format that is actually engaging to use makes a real difference.
Best for: Candidates who want real, bank-specific questions in a format built for drilling, not just reading. Great for beginners who need to prepare quickly.
This is obviously the most well-known free IB interview resource in existence. At 207 pages, it covers accounting fundamentals, valuation, LBO mechanics, M&A concepts, and behavioral frameworks, and it is completely free with an email signup on the M&I site.
The 2025 version is a real upgrade. It now includes expanded behavioral sections, deal discussions based on recent transactions, and 155 industry-specific questions across sectors.
Here is the honest caveat: interviewers know this guide exists, and at elite boutiques in particular, they actively avoid asking questions pulled directly from it. The 400 guide is a foundation, not a ceiling. Use it to build your baseline. Then go deeper with the resources below.
Best for: Getting a solid technical baseline before you specialize by firm or group. Answer every question out loud, not just in your head.
Wall Street Prep's paid product, the Red Book with 1,000 interview questions, costs money. Their free knowledge base does not.
The WSP site has detailed free articles covering nearly every IB technical topic: DCF walkthroughs, valuation methodology questions, accounting questions, M&A and LBO conceptual breakdowns, and behavioral guides. What makes WSP genuinely useful is not just the questions. It is the depth of the explanations. WSP teaches you why the answer is what it is, which is exactly what you need when an interviewer pushes past your first response.
Most candidates use WSP to understand concepts and a question bank like IB Vine to drill them. That is the right combination. Read the WSP article on DCF until you understand the logic. Then practice the question until the answer is automatic.
The Wall Street Prep Red Book is definitely one of the best paid resources available out there. However, multiple versions of it have been leaked on the internet, which I’ve attached below.
Best for: Building conceptual understanding rather than memorizing answers you cannot defend.
BIWS is primarily a paid platform. Their YouTube channel is completely free and one of the best video resources for IB technical concepts available anywhere.
The channel covers accounting fundamentals, DCF modeling, merger math, and LBO mechanics, taught by former investment bankers with step-by-step video walkthroughs. If you are the kind of learner who absorbs concepts better on screen than on a page, this is your resource.
It is particularly useful for "walk me through" questions. Walk me through a DCF. Walk me through an LBO. Walk me through the impact of a $10 increase in depreciation. Watching someone work through the logic out loud, in real time, is worth more than reading the same answer ten times.
Best for: Visual learners who need to see concepts explained before they can explain them confidently.
Wall Street Oasis has a free IB interview guide built from the reported experiences of over 30,000 people who have been through the process. The result is 101 common technical, behavioral, and logic questions with sample answers, all free and ungated.
It is not as comprehensive as the M&I guide or as interactive as IB Vine, but the behavioral section is genuinely worth reading. The sample answers for "Why IB?" and "Tell me about yourself" are useful not because you should copy them, but because seeing how others structure those answers often surfaces a framing or approach you had not considered for your own story.
Best for: Supplemental behavioral prep and a quick-hit technical review.
While this isn’t a traditional way to study your technical skills, I found it to be extremely useful to be updated during the process. This is separate from the WSO guide and, for candidates in active recruiting, it is honestly the more valuable part of the platform.
The Wall Street Oasis forum is where candidates post the actual questions they were asked in interviews, in real time, during recruiting season. Search any firm name and you will find threads from people who just walked out of their Evercore or Houlihan superday and posted every question they could remember. No published guide contains that. That is primary source intel from people who just sat in the chair you are about to sit in.
Cross-reference anything technical with WSP or M&I before you trust it, since not every post is accurate. But as a way to understand what a specific firm's interview actually looks like right now, the WSO forum is unmatched.
Best for: Real-time, firm-specific interview intelligence that no structured resource can replicate. Also great to know when interviews and programs are rolling out at specific firms.
CFI does not come up in IB recruiting conversations as often as it should, especially for candidates who are building their foundation from scratch.
Their free content library covers the three financial statements, valuation methods, WACC, DCF analysis, and M&A basics in a way that is genuinely accessible if you do not have an accounting or finance background. The explanations are structured and clear without assuming prior knowledge.
If you are a non-finance major or feel shaky on the accounting fundamentals, start here before you open a question bank. There is no point drilling DCF questions if you do not understand what free cash flow is. CFI closes that gap for free.
Best for: Non-finance majors and anyone who needs to build the conceptual foundation before drilling questions
8. Your Finance Club's Internal Question Bank
This was a tool that I underutilized completely until it was too late. Don’t make the same mistake.
Most finance clubs at schools with active IB recruiting maintain an internal question bank sourced from members who interviewed at specific banks and reported what they were asked. These are usually more current and more bank-specific than anything publicly available, because they come from students at your school who just went through your exact recruiting cycle.
For example, I had a first round interview for Guggenheim restructuring where I got wiped halfway through from the questions asked. What I didn’t realize is that my student fund has had a question bank with every technical they've asked since 2014.
If you are in your school's student-run fund, finance society, or equivalent, ask the officers what is available. If no formal bank exists yet, build one. Every member who interviews should contribute five questions. The students who follow you will benefit from it, and the process of organizing those questions is itself a form of review.
Best for: Firm-specific, cycle-specific prep that reflects what banks are actually asking at your school right now.
9. Alumni and Networking Contacts
If you have been networking, you have relationships with analysts and associates at firms you are targeting. Most candidates treat those relationships as a way to get their application noticed. That is only half of what they are for.
A 30-minute call with a current analyst at the group you are interviewing for is worth more than hours of solo prep. Ask what the interview format looks like. Ask what topics came up in their own interviews. If they like you, ask if they would be willing to do a quick mock. Most analysts remember what it felt like to be in your position and are genuinely willing to help.
One honest mock interview from someone inside the firm will tell you more about that interview than any guide that exists. The feedback is specific, current, and comes from someone who knows exactly what that team is looking for.
Best for: Group-specific, nuanced prep that no public resource can replicate.
This is the most underused resource on this list.
Both ChatGPT and Claude are free to use, and both can simulate a full IB technical or behavioral interview on demand, at any hour, without scheduling anything in advance. The key is how you prompt them. Instead of asking for a list of questions, try this:
"You are an investment banking interviewer at a XYZ bank conducting a first-round technical interview for a Summer Analyst role. You are interviewing a sophomore at XYZ college. Ask me one question at a time, wait for my response, give me brief feedback on whether my answer was strong or where it fell short, and then move to the next question. Grade my responses from 1 - 5 and then give me an improved version of my answer afterwards. Make it a mixture of behavioral. Technical, and macro-level questions."
You can also paste your "Why IB?" answer and ask the AI to push back on it the way a skeptical interviewer would. You can ask it to generate group-specific questions for LevFin, M&A, or DCM.
It is not a replacement for a real mock with an actual banker. But it is the best on-demand practice tool that currently exists, and it costs nothing.
Best for: Active, out-loud practice on demand, especially in the final days before an interview.
Stephen Turban is the co-founder of Wall Street Guide and Lumiere Education. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard College in Statistics, worked as an Business Analytics Fellow at McKinsey & Company. He founded WSG to give ambitious students the same insider access to finance and consulting recruiting that top-school students take for granted.
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