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IB Core Technicals
Finance & Investment Banking

Valuation I — DCF

TechnicalEasy~30 minDesigned by experts

About this interview

A technical interview on IB Core Technicals, pitched at the easy level. A voice AI interviewer leads the conversation, adapts its questions to your answers, keeps you on topic, and afterward gives you honest, specific feedback on where you were strong and where to improve. Expect roughly 30 minutes.

What you'll be assessed on

Build unlevered free cash flow from EBIT and explain why financing effects are deliberately kept out of the calculation
Calculate and defend WACC, including CAPM cost of equity, unlevered/relevered beta, and cost of debt estimation for both public and private companies
Compute terminal value under both the Gordon growth and exit multiple methods, and cross-check one against the other
Correctly bridge from enterprise value to equity value to an implied share price, including edge cases like lease-liability treatment
Articulate a DCF's real limitations — where judgment enters, when the method breaks down, and how to reconcile a DCF-implied value against the market's current price

Topics covered

DCF Framework OverviewUnlevered Free Cash Flow BuildWACC & Cost of EquityCost of Debt & Capital Structure WeightsTerminal ValueDiscounting MechanicsEnterprise-to-Equity Value BridgeSensitivity, Sanity Checks & DCF Limitations

A few sample questions

Just examples to set expectations - the real interview has many more and adapts to your responses.

“In two or three sentences, what is a DCF actually trying to tell you about a company?
“You're valuing a private company with no publicly traded stock and therefore no directly observable beta. How do you actually get a beta to use in your CAPM calculation?
“If a company's perpetual growth rate assumption is set only slightly below WACC — say WACC is 9% and you use a 8.5% growth rate instead of a more standard 2.5% — walk me through mathematically why that single change would blow up the terminal value, and why that's not a reasonable assumption in the first place.

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