Tell Me About a Recent Deal: Full Guide and Example

The “tell me about a recent deal” question in finance interviews is designed to test your genuine interest in the industry.

Anyone can copy/paste a “story” based on one of our templates, and plenty of candidates are good at memorizing the technical questions.

But it’s much harder to “fake” your way into a solid deal discussion, especially in an in-person setting.

Deal discussions are popular for the same reason that assessment centers are widely used in London: They’re a quick/cheap way to assess candidates and provide more accurate results than generic interview questions.

If you are changing careers, you can expect to get this question a lot because it’s a great way to assess your motivations and commitment.

Are you recruiting for investment banking roles to double your compensation?

Or do you have a genuine interest in working on deals?

Note that this guide is for discussing deals in the news, not deals you have worked on personally.

Discussing your own deals is different, so please refer to the “deal sheet” article for more on that one.

Why and When Does This Question Matter?

I’d summarize the importance of the “tell me about a recent deal” question as follows:

• Most Important: MBA-level candidates moving into IB from non-finance backgrounds and lateral hires recruiting from non-deal roles.
• Somewhat Important: Undergrads and Master’s students aiming for IB summer internships that may convert into full-time offers.
• Less Important: Early university students aiming for “steppingstone internships” (e.g., in Year 1 or 2).
• Even Less Important: Anyone with direct deal experience in previous internships or full-time jobs (e.g., you worked at a smaller bank and are moving to a larger bank).

If you’re in the “Most Important” category, it’s worth spending a few hours preparing a solid deal discussion.

If you’re in one of the other categories, spend less time on it and stay focused on your story and answers to the normal fit and technical questions.

Tell Me About a Recent Deal: Discussion Criteria

I’ll suggest these qualities for any deal you discuss:

• Deal Type: It is best to pick an M&A or leveraged buyout deal because it is far easier to find information on these transactions, especially if the buyer or seller is U.S.-based. Even if you interview in capital markets or restructuring, using an M&A or LBO deal is fine.
• Industry: It’s best to pick a “generalist” industry, such as consumer/retail, healthcare, technology, or industrials, because deals are more standard and won’t require you to learn industry-specific metrics or jargon.
• Timing: Something announced within the past 6 months is best, but you could go back a bit further than that (e.g., 12 months) if you can’t find anything more recent that meets your industry/geography/deal type criteria.
• Banks Involved: You do not need to find a deal that the bank you’re interviewing with has advised on. It’s often better to pick a deal they haven’t worked on, so the interviewers will know less about it.
• Number of Deals: You just need one (1) deal discussion in nearly all cases. It’s not practical to go beyond that because it’s too much information to remember.

Tell Me About a Recent Deal: How to Find Deals and Information

If you have Capital IQ or FactSet, you can screen transactions based on these criteria and click through to the results to find the description and documents for each deal:

If you cannot access these services, you must rely on simple online searches and deal summaries from other sources.

There are plenty of finance newsletters from sources/people like Axios, Litquidity, etc., so you can certainly subscribe to one of those and pick a deal listed there.

But there are also plenty of lesser-known-but-still-useful sources.

As a specific example, the Bocconi Students M&A Circle has write-ups and analysis of deals each year, so that could be a starting point.

Another example is that many boutique banks issue market and M&A reports with recent transaction activity and even public comps for the sector.

The best reports I’ve seen come from Capstone Partners, which publishes detailed “industry insights” for the most popular industries.

These reports are all free and require no login or even an email sign-up.

For example, if you go to Capstone’s Food & Beverage M&A report, you can find “notable M&A transactions by subsector” on page 8 of the PDF:

They won’t necessarily give the multiples for these deals, but once you have a few names, you can do some quick searches to find the financials.

For an M&A deal, you can search for the following information:

• The Fairness Opinion if the seller was a U.S. public company (“site:sec.gov fairness opinion [Deal Name]”).
• The investor presentation for the deal.
• Any press releases or commentary on it – ideally, original work on sites like Substack rather than junk from copy/pasted or AI-generated sources.

If you go against my advice and discuss an equity or debt deal instead, you’d have to search for documents like the S-1 for an IPO or a credit rating update issued by the credit rating agencies.

To say anything about the valuation, you’d have to use sites like FinViz or BeyondSPX to look up multiples for other companies in the sector (or hope the Capstone reports cover it).

I recommend against discussing these deals because of the extra time and effort required.

Recommended Prep for a Sample Deal: Celsius / Alani Nu

Continuing with the food & beverage industry, I’ll use Celsius’ $1.8 billion acquisition of Alani Nu, announced in February 2025, as an example.

There is no Fairness Opinion because Alani Nu was private, but there are shorter and longer investor presentations:

• Celsius / Alani Nu – Short Presentation (PDF)
• Celsius / Alani Nu – Longer Presentation (PDF)

The quality of Substack articles varies widely, but it’s always worth searching the site for commentary on specific deals:

• Celsius: Alani-Nu acquisition thoughts, updated valuation model
• Alani Nu Financial Details
• Celsius: All or Nothing?

The details in these posts are not always correct, but you can sometimes use them to stand out in interviews by bringing up more interesting talking points.

It’s not like reading the WSJ or FT, where the articles recycle the same points repeatedly (usually from the company’s PR department).

Tell Me About a Recent Deal: Outline for Celsius / Alani Nu

You should read enough of the source material to outline the following points:

1. Background Information – What are the approximate Revenue and EBITDA of the Buyer and Seller? What industries and geographies are they in?
2. Deal Rationale – Why did the Buyer or Seller (or standalone company) want to do the deal?
3. Premium Paid, Deal Multiples, or Credit Stats/Ratios – Estimate the price and any unusual features. You can cite terms like the coupon rate, original issue discount, and covenants for debt deals.
4. Your Opinion of the Deal – Will it benefit the company raising capital? What about their investors? Will both the Buyer and Seller in an M&A deal benefit? Why or why not?

Here’s a sample outline for this Celsius / Alani Nu deal:

1. Background Information – Celsius Holdings is an energy drink and liquid supplement company with ~$1.4 billion in revenue and ~$160 million in EBITDA. Alani Nutrition is a producer of zero-sugar energy drinks, snacks, and protein shakes geared toward females; it had ~$600 million in revenue and $87 million in EBITDA at the time of the deal.
2. Deal Rationale – Despite strong revenue growth in earlier years, Celsius’ sales had fallen in the most recent quarter due to poor consumer spending and convenience store sales and a saturated energy drink market; Alani Nu would allow it to return to growth and gain new distribution channels.
3. Premium Paid, Deal Multiples, or Credit Stats/Ratios – Celsius paid around 3x trailing revenue and 21x trailing EBITDA based on press releases. These are very high multiples for food & beverage companies, but Alani Nu had grown at 50% per year in the two previous years, so they are justifiable. If you include the full $50 million of potential synergies and subtract the $150 million of tax benefits, as the company does (see page 30 in the investor presentation), the EBITDA multiple is only 12x, which is more reasonable.
4. Your Opinion of the Deal – This seems like an expensive deal in a market segment that is notoriously difficult; energy drink makers tend to grow quickly and then “flatline” once they saturate their markets, and we don’t know how close Alani Nu is to market saturation. Also, Celsius issued $900 million of Debt to do the deal, which raised the combined Debt / EBITDA to over 2x, even after synergies. This might limit the company’s ability to do larger deals in the future.

This is a lengthy outline (over 250 words), so it might be too long for your initial answer.

A shorter, ~100-word version might be a better “first response” in this case:

“One recent deal I followed was Celsius’ $1.8 billion acquisition of Alani Nu in the energy drink and supplement space. Celsius had weak recent sales growth and did the deal to return to growth and gain more distribution, but the unadjusted multiple was 21x EBITDA, which is very high for this vertical; adjusted for synergies and tax benefits, it was more like 12x. I still think it’s quite an expensive deal in a difficult market, and it might reduce Celsius’ ability to do future deals since it also issued $900 million in Debt to fund it.”

Tell Me About a Recent Deal: Follow-Up Questions

When you present your short deal outline, the discussion could go in different directions.

If the banker is satisfied and wants to ask about other topics, they might switch to other questions.

But if they want to dig deeper or test your knowledge, they might ask follow-up questions to see how much you know.

All you can do to “prepare” for these questions is read more of the source material and sketch answers to a few common follow-ups.

Common questions include:

• Can you describe the financials or valuation multiples in more detail? (This is where the Capstone or FinViz multiples come in handy)
• What was the deal financing? How much Cash, Stock, and Debt were used, and why?
• If you were the Buyer, would you do this deal? If not, which terms would you change to make it viable?
• Were there any unusual terms, such as Earnouts or collar structures?
• What were the main risk factors in this deal?
• Can you describe the overall process, such as how many buyers the bankers contacted? (Only feasible if there’s a Fairness Opinion with a timeline)

This information takes more time to find, so budget your time based on the importance of this question (not important for university students, but more important for MBA/experienced hires).

Should You Use AI Tools to Automate Your Responses?

Since we first covered deal discussions on this site, a flood of AI tools, chatbots, and AI-powered search engines have been released.

Many of these tools claim to “do all the work for you.”

So, you might look at this guide and think:

“This seems like a lot of work. Can’t I just ask ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, or Grok to do everything? Then I can memorize the answers.”

The short answer is that you can use these tools to speed up your research/prep process, but you should never rely on them 100%.

There are several specific problems:

1. Missing Data – These tools only have access to publicly crawlable data on the internet, but some deals are never reported publicly (or the financial details are undisclosed). So, you need paid services like Capital IQ for the best data and deal lists.
2. Incorrect Information – Yes, LLMs have improved over time, but they still get plenty of details wrong. I’ve seen fabricated deals, fake numbers, misinterpreted numbers, and more.
3. Interview Performance – If you do not read the source documents and at least write an outline, discussing the deal in in-person interviews will be much tougher. It doesn’t “stick” in the same way unless you do the work.

The last point is so important that I recommend using pencil and paper to draft deal outlines and even responses to fit/behavioral questions.

Yes, it’s 2025, and I am still recommending a stone-age method because it’s still the best way to make details “stick” for in-person interviews.

Tell Me About a Recent Deal: Final Thoughts

I mentioned in the introduction that the “tell me about a decent deal” question is designed to test your interest and commitment to investment banking, especially for career changers.

But it’s also a great example of why banks are old-school and will always conduct in-person interviews, even if the initial rounds are done via HireVue.

You could cheat your way through entire interviews if they’re all remote.

And even when you go in for an in-person Superday, it’s still possible to “game” standard interview questions with enough memorization.

But it’s very difficult to get through an extended deal discussion if you haven’t done the work or don’t understand the metrics and rationale.

So, expect this question to become even more important in the future.

Just hope the shift happens before banks shift even more of their workload to bots and agents…

If you like this post, take a look at Investment Banking Fairness Opinions: Profitable and Prestigious, or Glamorless Gruntwork?.