How to Sound Smart in Investment Banking Interviews | 2026 M&A Review

Hello and welcome back to the Market Maker Podcast. And today we are dusting off our rucks sacks and polishing our shoes because that's right, it's back to school. In fact, my youngest has just started primary school. Four years old. I can't believe it. Yeah, taking both of them to school now. My life has got infinitely easier. One location. Uh but yeah, this episode is focused on that start of the academic year which is when application season of course really goes into high gear and it's not just about applying to firms. You've got to navigate a multi-week process all the way up to hopefully for a lot of our listeners the super days and the backtoback interviews. So this episode will give you almost hopefully everything you need to sound smart about the state of M&A. We'll discuss what's driven deal volume and value so far this year, what to look out for over the next few months, and how to sound extremely smart in the applications and interview phase. Well, that's if you can sound anywhere close to Steven, then you're probably in a good place. Yeah, I was always I was always very good at interviews and absolutely terrible at the job. So I would interview extremely well and then actually you know when I land on the desk they're like oh gosh guy's not as impressive as I thought he was. >> That's why I like doing podcast 45 minutes I can I can sell myself. [laughter] >> We all know that's not not a true state of affairs but look let let's um let's get into it then I guess starting with the hottest topic that people will be applying to which is M&A. So, where do you want to go globally or by sector with this part? Yeah. So, let's let's do a bit of an H1 or you know, we're getting towards the end of Q3 now. Let's do a little bit of a 2026 retrospective. And what we're going to do, we're going to cover M&A, then we're going to cover equity capital markets in a little less detail. What we're going to try and do is we're going to try and give you the context that you need in order to understand where we are in the cycle and what's going on in the world of M&A. We're also going to give you maybe a little bit of a forward-looking outlook and some of the things that you should be aware of. We're going to talk about a couple of things maybe to sound smart when it comes to interviews and a little bit of theory that's going to help you on uh give you give you some solid foundations. So part one M&A headlines. So on the M&A front, it's been an unbelievable year so far, right? We had three or four years in terms of deal value and deal volume where we were pretty much in the doldrums. 2021 was an absolutely brilliant year. Almost $6 trillion worth of deals being done. Happy investment bankers. Then we 22 23 24 were in the kind of $3 trillion a year number which really really wasn't historically a big amount of M&A transactions for reasons we'll discuss in a minute but so far in 2026 I mean we had three tr $3 trillion worth of deals in the first half of the year alone with Q2 posting $1.6 6 trillion worth of M&A transactions, a quarterly record. So this is, you know, it's boom time for the investment bankers. Let's maybe take a look at some of the more specifics. So the first half was actually, and this is a trend that's certainly worth thinking about when you're preparing for interviews, the first half was marked by fewer deals, but more mega deals. So total deal count fell by 9% compared with H1 2025. but more mega deals. 47 deals above 10 billion dollars totaling $1.3 trillion worth of mega deals. So again, this is just a real invitation just to start scratching beneath those headlines and go, "All right, this was a this has been a breakout year so far, but a breakout year for whom and why?" Yeah. So, one of these that I was reading was and as you've just described, high value and low volume. So, going through the seasonal kind of part of the year and all the other factors that were going on, how would you explain that when probed? Yeah, it's a really really it's a really interesting one because there's there's no really extremely obvious answers and we can point towards just to give you an example of some of the mega deals that you might want to go and research. SpaceX's acquisition of XAI for $250 billion. Not really an acquisition to be totally honest. Let's kind of put that one aside, but it has contributed to the stats. um Unilver Foods combination with McCormick uh in a $44.8 billion uh reverse Morris trust all about tax incentives worth taking a look at that uh GI and EQT's 34 3 $3 33.4 $4 billion acquisition of AES Corporation, all about AI infrastructure. Remember Next Era and its 687 billion deal for Dominion Energy and Shell's $22 billion purchase of ARC resources. So that's just a few to research, but why high value, low volume? It kind of goes back to and we started to discuss this on the back end of the last episode all about hugging face uh and Nvidia's acquisition of that company for $13 billion kind of goes back to this capital as power argument. There is a real and you guys talk about it on the markets podcast. There is a real concentration of the winners becoming bigger and the losers or the notwinners stagnating a little bit or or falling uh a little bit uh by the wayside. The K-shaped economy, the Mag 7, you know, the acquisition power of the biggest companies is getting stronger and the defensibility of the smaller companies is getting maybe slightly weaker. So when you've got companies like Nvidia that throw off a hundred billion of free cash flow every single year, it doesn't make any sense for them to go out and do a $500 million deal. It's not going to move the needle. It's not worth the time. They have to do a $20 billion, $10 billion deal for it to even register as a strategic action. And remember, and this anyone that's worked in M&A or anyone that's been through a transaction will know this, it's basically as hard to do a small deal as it is to do a big deal to a greater or lesser extent. You have to go through the same process. So, if you're going to if you're going to go through this really, really hard long process and you're generating 20 billion, 30 billion, 40 billion of cash every year, you might as well do big deals, right? is the only thing that's going to really recognize. It's the only thing that's going to be efficient. And at the same time, just to kind of uh conclude this high value, low volume point, you've got the increase in size of buyout funds. So, private equity buyout funds that buy entire companies. If I've just raised a $25 billion buyout fund and I'm KKR or Apollo or whatever it might be, I'm not going to be buying $200 million companies. I need to be buying $10 billion companies, $15 billion companies and and and adding debt to the mix. So we've just got into this capital as power, you know, concentration of capital, the winners winning more and the rest kind of being left a little bit behind. And that's what's leading to this high value, low volume phenomena. So in an interview then there's only so much time that you would have to articulate these sorts of things. So if you were looking at the current state of play and you know the interview technique is typically you know you're answering the rule of threes I think it's supported by this because of evidence 1 2 3 and that's why I have this view how would you articulate that in a really concise direct way that an interview is left with you've possessed the knowledge and you're not overt talking. Yeah, absolutely. I think Yeah. So maybe let's let's frame the question. So what are the mega caps aiming for when they're doing these massive acquisitions? Might be a typical interview question as you've got maybe 5 minutes into the interview. Rule of three. Number one, large cap firms buying AI capability uh at obviously extremely high valuations in order to adapt, in order to ride the wave, ride the bubble, companies. Number two, companies buying AI infrastructure. And when we talk about energy deals, when we talk about infrastructure deals, this is all the AI buildout, right? To capitalize on demand. And then number three, old-fashioned companies aiming for M&A to build defensibility and scale against the AI revolution. And we've mentioned previously things like the SAS apocalypse or the apparent SAS apocalypse and these highuting concepts that AI is going to destroy corporations as we know it. There's enough of that mood music going around that big firms are going to want to tie up with other big firms as a defensive strategy, not an offensive strategy. So that's probably why mega caps are going for such big deals. And is there some extra additional source you could sprinkle on which is about more of the uh I guess macro political environment? You know, we've got Trump in power. What does that mean for big business and deal making ahead of midterm timing? China robotics we talked about in an episode just what two or three weeks ago which is just going gang busters at the moment. So would that be an appropriate thing to also highlight? >> Yeah. And and the interview question might well be something like uh tell me what are the conducive conditions for M&A? What makes more M&A happen? 2026 breakout year. Why? And there are the obvious answers which everyone's going to give. So a very obvious one is low or stable interest rates, driving down the cost of capital, boosting valuations, and encouraging more M&A to happen. That's a bit of a curious one because anyone that's only been in the market for the last, you know, 10 12 years would think that interest rates are actually quite high. [laughter] Um, I've put a little a little interest rate chart in our notes. Um, and thankfully, and me and you can't remember 1982, 1983, where interest rates in the US were up at 20%. That's not going to be a conducive condition for M&A. But what's a little bit more of a nuance on the interest rates is they don't necessarily have to be rock bottom 0.0%. They just have to be moderate and stableish. So you don't want to do M&A during an interest rate hiking cycle. um you don't want to do M&A when uh inflation is running out of control or when when you can't really predict the future, right? So stable predictableish interest rates are a good conducive um factor for M&A. Secondly, from an obvious perspective, confidence and stability. You need some level of you know today is going to look something like tomorrow and we can predict tomorrow with some degree of certainty and we believe that tomorrow might well be slightly better than today. So that is number two. If it looks like the world's falling off a cliff, you know, financial crisis as co was was was kind of kicking into gear, then you're not going to get a lot of M&A done. You obviously need this favorable political environment that we've seen with Trump over the last few years. Much more M&A done under Trump than under Biden. Uh just look at uh the uh the appointments within the regulators and the kind of removal of Lena Khn and and all of this trustbusting kind of stuff. Then oh yeah, and finally from an obvious perspective like there's got to be a trend. There's got to be a theme. There's got to be a bandwagon to jump on. Right? If and again, if I'm a CEO, what am I what are my shareholders going to be talking to me about? What is your AI strategy? That's it. Right? And maybe my AI strategy is buying is acquisitions. So, those are the obvious ones. You'll probably get a few ticks in the box there. If I was going a little bit less obvious, I'd talk about things like uh obviously and and you'll know this better than I do, but we've had record days, maybe 40 record highs in the S&P this year and 35 40 in the NASDAQ or whatever the number is, right? um these when I am buying a company, my share price is part of my acquisition currency or my shares are part of my acquisition currency. And if my share price goes from $100 to $200 and I'm buying another company with my shares, I can basically afford to pay a lot more because my share price has just gone up. It's just 2xed, right? So the increase in share prices of large companies as an acquisition currency to go out and do deals is a slightly more nuanced point. Maybe the second one and actually when I talk about this when I teach this stuff I consider this to be the most important and and you'll get this from a market's perspective. We call it the closing of the bid ask spread. So, let's use a let's use a kind of housing analogy. So, let's say I put my house on the market, right? Uh, and I put my house on the market and I ignore all the estate agents that say this house is worth, you know, a million quid and I say, "No, I'm going to put it on the market for 3 million quid." Right? That's that's what I want to sell this house for. Of course, no one's going to buy this house cuz it's not worth 3 million quid. the bid R spread is just, you know, is far too high. If I lower it to a million quid and there are buyers that want to buy it for 900K and I'm willing to sell it for a million, the bid off spread is much lower and we can probably find a middle ground in 2023 2024 when M&A deal volume and values were very low. The bid R spread, what the sellers were willing to sell for versus what the buyers were willing to buy for. The bid R spread was just too high to meet in the middle. This is a lot of private equity firms wanting to sell at a very high multiple to get their return on investment and a lot of buyers not willing to buy at that multiple because interest rates have gone up. this bid ask spread is coming down so that there is a space to negotiate between right I can come to the table and go hey I only want to I only want to pay 12 times profit for this business and the seller goes well I'm not willing to sell for under 13 times profit you can meet somewhere in the middle there's a conversation to be had that drives more action than almost all of the other stuff that I've said is that almost like a compounding effect. It's like the more depth liquidity there is in the market, i.e. buyers and sellers, then the more chance there is to have a narrower spread. Yeah, absolutely. In a in a it's a it's yeah, you can create very very strong parallels to the markets that you guys speak about. It's just a much less uh visible uh highly traded market. It's much more opaque and it's much more slow moving. But yeah, if there's loads of buyers, if there's loads of sellers in the market and if they have similarish expectations on valuation, then you're going to get a load of deals. So, one of the things we talked about in lots of episodes in 2026 is listing arbitrage. Like the loss of uh the allure of London as they see the multiple valuations, they can just get pickups in in the US. Is that also factored into other things to mention? >> Yeah, this is the classic merger arbitrage that I might speak to if I was if we were getting in a little bit more depth in an interview. And this is the classic a very very simplistic form of arbitrage where let's say I'm a software company a healthcare software company based in the US and on the stock market my share price is trading at or you know my company's trading at 20 times earnings right and my direct extreme competitor the closest closest thing doing exactly the same thing. But over in the UK, because of the lower valuations in the UK due to a lot of different structural factors is only trading at 12 times earnings. So even if I offer a significant acquisition premium and maybe buy that company for 15 times its earnings, a nice premium for the shareholders in the UK, I can still take those earnings and as soon as those earnings get folded into my American entity which is valued at 20 times, I get that I get that uptick. I get that arbitrage. It's happened quite a lot. European M&A deal value is up 66%. And we've spoken a lot about some of the crown jewels maybe of of of Europe and certainly the UK coming, you know, being bought by American companies that just have higher valuations and can take advantage of this arbitrage. Okay. Well, look, let's let's peel back a layer then and let's go from the top level volume, some of the value to some of the sectors. What does that look like so far for 2026? Okay. All right. I'm going to give you a quiz. Um, so rank the these five sectors in order based on deal value. healthcare, utility and energy, finance, real estate, tech. >> Okay, just to clarify, value, >> it's value, not volume, it's value. >> Value. Okay, so tech number one. And then I would say earlier in the year, I seem to recall you and I just talking about energy deals again and again and again and again. So I'd say tech just because of size one, utility energy two. Uh we've talked a lot about healthcare. So I'll put those third. Real estate. So what's left? Real estate and finance. I'd say real estate four, finance five. Oh, you're so close. And your logic was absolutely right. So tech number one, um almost a trillion dollars of deal value. uh which is up significantly from 2025 almost completely down to the $250 billion of SpaceX and XAI. take that away and it's a slightly more modest year. But technology number one, healthcare number two. So not utilities, utilities number three, which has had the biggest yearon-year increase from 2026 uh from 2025, sorry. Finance number four, which actually has had a slight down year relative to 2025. And then real estate down in in in in fifth position. So obviously this is all a technology play. My kind of caveat or my critique of that is everything's technology. [laughter] I think there there are different types of technology and technology is now such a broad wide bucket that I can't even contemplate you know if I'm a if I'm a tech investor what does that even mean right [laughter] the subsectors are so vast equally if you work in and perhaps you can break down some of the jargon because I think a lot of students who applied to IBD investment banking and they don't know all of the division of duties amongst the and sector coverage. But just like you said, if you're covering technology now as a banker, is there subsets of the subsets sort of situation going on here? >> Yeah, absolutely. And there will be there will be TMT, technology, media, telecommunications. I love the fact that it it is still to an extent in >> Why is that still a thing? Outdated by about 20 years. >> Uh the TMT teams. Yeah, I mean maybe I'm outdated by 20 years, but it still does exist in certain places. Again, it all depends on what specialtity you are driving towards within your organization. Only a very few organizations like the Goldman Sachs or the JP Morgans can be credible and desirable across the technology and quite frankly across all industry spectrum. So if you're a slightly smaller maybe a boutique organization either you would focus on a particular sector maybe you're a brilliant uh mining company M&A boutique and maybe that's one of your three or four specialisms and you have got you managed to poach the best mining banker from Goldman Sachs and built that franchise or built that team around that individual contributor you're you know You need to be focusing on these niches and technology is no longer a niche. You need to be niches within niches if you are a boutique or if you're a an upstart trying to compete with the likes of Goldman Sachs, uh JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, etc. So, yeah, you got to you got to get specialism of those big bulge bracket banks you just mentioned. I'm assuming then the last time we checked in on the league tables, it's a pretty familiar grouping on the podium. Is there any other firms here that are particular standouts or or differences between this year and last year? >> Yeah, so Goldman Sachs number one, as you'd expect, $1.4 trillion worth of deals done, picking up almost $3 billion worth of fees. That's a 33% increase, followed by the likes of JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley. in terms of fee income uh on my FT League table. Evercore is now number four, which is really interesting because it's only number nine from a deal value perspective. So, it hasn't necessarily it hasn't necessarily got on like the mega mega deals, but it's got on deals that are paying a much higher fee relative to the value of that deal. Same goes for center partners. So number 10 in terms of deal value, number five in terms of fee income. Really really interesting. So therefore, and this is comment from our researcher Darius who is all over this stuff. So thank you Darius for this. If I was a student sharpening my CV for the recruitment season, which as you know is already well underway, 30 internships coming live as of the 1st of September a couple of weeks ago. I would target this is Darius's advice bulge brackets as you would as you would probably suggest tech focused boutiques so such such as uh catalyst ever center view that which are a little bit leaner but getting a lot of deal volume and then maybe infrastructure focused investment banks Namura's a very good one for that standard chartered more kind of focused on on east and and and and Asia as well JP Morgan's natural resources team. This is this is these are the kind of areas that you might want to locate to and these are the areas that are probably going to be hiring more as well. You probably don't want to be focusing on a declining industry and a declining bank, you know, probably not worth your application. That's such good advice. Like that is gold what what you just and Daryus is uh kind of passing on that that knowledge. I love that. like Namura, Green Tech, Standard Charter, JP Morgan's natural resources team. Like I think those you know when when when students and we're in quite a negative cycle when there's lots of mainstream media headlines about how difficult it is as a grad uh AI inflation to the application volume numbers is impossible to get an internship. I think that's true if you're coming at it at a blind base level, but if you're looking at it tactically, I think you can move the dial quite dramatically. And I think that is such sound advice. Not only are you someone who really knows what you're talking about and understanding this industry, but you are optimizing for exactly what you said, the demand for where the service uh volume is coming from and then to the the more narrow application pool. So, it's kind of like a it's such a it's such obvious when someone tells you, but I would imagine that Daryus is probably one in uh I don't know, he's a he's a he's a minority group, but they're the ones who who smash it, right? >> Yeah. And there's always that tendency just to spray and prey and write generic cover letters and just go for, oh yeah, I've applied for 300 jobs and I've got zero. It just it just doesn't pay off. You should be thinking, you should be doing a lot of work researching the 15. I'm not saying just apply for one because that's too much concentration. It's a bit like a and maybe this is a stretching the analogy too far, but if you're a portfolio manager at a big asset management firm, you don't want your portfolio to consist of one company because that's not really portfolio management. That's concentration risk. You also don't want your portfolio to be 400 companies because I might as well just buy the index. You want 20 or 30 really wellthought through very very strategic companies. In the same way as if I'm applying to jobs, I want to be spending, you know, two days on 10, you know, two days each on 10 to 15 applications that I've worked really, really hard to research and I've really got that kind of knowledge that can be transferred from one application to another because I'm really deep into that particular part and I can feel really really confident that I'm within my depth and not out of my depth. Yeah, I think that's a really good point you made there. It does get more efficient the more you do because yes, you're optimizing for the firm or the desk or the team, but generally speaking, you're saying similar type things because you've hopefully found your your area of finance. And yeah, I know people will have lots of comments about the volume versus uh uh quant quantity versus quality perspective, but I think you've just got to be sensible. Like you just said, Stephen, you allocate time proportionately. There's going to be a group that you've identified that you'll spend a lot of time on, and there's going to be a group you'll spend lesser time on. So there's a >> Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And one of the great things about humans, especially young people, is that you can you can get curious about almost anything, right? [laughter] Um so it only takes curious people a couple of hours to get really into something. So you might just be thinking, "Oh gosh, do I do I really care about data centers or do I really care about infrastructure?" If you're a curious person, spend 3 hours researching it. By the time you've started to get that excitement of not necessarily mastery, but understanding that starts to compound and you start to go, "Oh, I know a little bit about this." And it and then you start listening to a podcast and you get a little bit more interested. So yeah, just yeah, get curious. If you had to pick an episode then going through the recent back catalog that we've been doing and you were like okay well it's always tempting to just go I'll talk about a big deal because it's big for that sake but sometimes it's better to go with something you have an affinity for right because you can show enthusiasm for the subject so what would your episode be that that you enjoyed that we've done that you think could be a good talking point for an interview >> yeah so I think mine is probably the one that we did on the EasyJet Apollo deal. Probably came out about six weeks ago and we'll put a link to it in the notes. I love that deal because a it it gave me an opportunity to go deep into the economics and business model and metrics of an airline that we use all the time. I'm flying on EasyJet on Monday and I'll be understanding what the capacity utilization constraints are and the the metrics and the economics and it's really really cool because you can contextualize. Just going to add Darius's favorite. So his choice is the Seattle Seahawks buyout. Again, if you're talking maybe to a US firm, US investment bank and you want to get smart on things like tax and tax incentives and tax breaks and things like that, then definitely go for that episode. Ant, what about yourself? Yeah, mine's more AI and not because of it's the big story, but I think there's so much noise about the subject and that episode we did about 6 weeks ago, the AI investment playbook about the different kind of parts the supply chain or the layers to it I think was really useful way to just understand the subject matter from the perspective of your future roles in finance. So that would be the one. But yeah, as you said, we'll drop some of the links in the in the show notes. So, let's let's move on then and let's So, we've done the retro. Let's do the forward looking. Get your crystal ball out from your It's hidden in there with all your books behind you, I'm sure, somewhere. So, what what is it telling us? >> Yeah, I think so. So much of so much of the world of M&A and and zooming out the world of finance and corporate finance and IPOs, but also markets and and everything that you guys chat about, it's so predicated on whether there is a meaningful productivity and earnings uplift from the AI buildout and AI investment, right? this whole boom, this whole M&A boom is is is dependent on that. And one of the markers, one of the key markers that we can take a look at over the next definitely over the next 6 months, maybe even earlier, is the anthropic IPO. It feels like I mean, there's rumors that the S1 might have already been released by the time this this episode is out. So, we might have to do a special episode on that. We might already be late to the party, but look, we need to we it will be the first opportunity for us to go deep into the numbers of Anthropic to see what this breakout lab is actually doing from a from a revenue perspective. >> Just to put your feet on the to the fire, what's your intuition, do you think, about what it actually looks like under the bonnet? Uh, >> I think that's a feet of fire. I think that it will find a way to prove profitability through lots of very very clever advanced agreements and and machinations with some of the other firms in this space. Uh I think the revenue growth story is real. I think it will it will it will be clearly extraordinary and much much more impressive than a SpaceX story. No question about it. Regardless, I regardless I think that this thing is going to be valued at $2 trillion and I think it's going to go crazy on day one because because of just the sheer pent up excitement about about anthropic and it will suck all of the dollars that OpenAI would have got, right? Can can I just ask because you are like the the strategy guy when it comes to these these business types and deals. My question is that I I talked to a few people who both use it and are close to people in the in the the business of anthropic and a lot of it that comes back is whilst we as the end user get the our touch point our interaction with anthropic is the software that we use it's clawed and so on but whenever I talk to people who who either work there or know people who work there or using let's say some of their training courses and certific certifications. It seems almost shambolic in terms of the actual infrastructure that supports then a business. At what point is it that the technology is so spectacular and and front running? When does the business catch up with that parabolic rise in revenue that's so concentrated on the technology? Is there a risk that the business doesn't fill the shoes of the technology? Yeah, absolutely. And and definitely go back to the episode a few weeks ago that recorded about the business model of AI and this this discussion between when does a lab become a business? So, an AI lab, anthropic, an AI lab, uh, open AI. When does that turn from being a lab, which just is researching and building these amazing frontier models, to a business that is generating hundreds of billions of dollars a year and satisfying, delighting its clients. And anthropic, to all intents and purposes, has done a much better job than Open AI, moving from a lab to a business. But it is a culture change. A massive massive culture change. If I start, you know, if I start a business with you tomorrow ant, we would be obsessed with customer satisfaction. We'd be thinking, how do we delight the customer on a daily basis? How do we build something that a customer wants? That's not the way anthropic was started. Anthropic was started to solve AGI and the sing and the singularity. So, it's a massive mindset shift. And what I always say with regards to breakout startups is if you've got product market fit, like it doesn't really matter. The rest of the business can be absolutely rubbish and you'll still get people knocking down your door to buy your product or to use your product. And that's kind of what Anthropic's got at the moment. It's a bit shambolic. It might be a little bit janky, but it's got product market fit. Much worse is you've got the most beautiful, perfect business organization. Everything is flying, your customer service is great, but no one wants your product. Um, that's, you know, that's a death nail for any startup. So, yeah, we'll see what happens in a few weeks time. What about as well looking at the second half or the last quarter of this year, something that hasn't really picked up traction yet cuz the AI thing so dominant, the midterms. So, how would you in an interview scenario be weighing the risk and reward of the upcoming midterms from what we know from polling and so forth at this present point in time? Yeah, it feels like, and again, I'm slightly stepping out of my lane here, but it feels like it's pretty neckand-neck uh 50/50 between Democrats and Republicans. And again, it's interesting because you would always think, gosh, Republicans, you know, naturally more pro business, lower regulation, good for things like M&A, but you've also got the inflationary nature of the war in Iran and some of the tariff policies that may not be as conducive to M&A. So my [laughter] firstly what tends to happen in a run-up to big political events is that deals stop getting done in anticipation of the certainty that happens after that election, the midterms, whatever it might be, that doesn't seem to be happening. It seems like we're going gang busters irrespective of what's going to happen in November. And maybe that's because regardless of whether it might swing red or swing blue, it feels like, you know, the Republicans are not creating an extraordinarily conducive environment to unbelievable M&A deal volume and value because of some of the things some of the things that's happened over the last couple years. and the Democrats probably won't be able to do anything that is hugely destructive to this boom that we're seeing in M&A. So things are just going on business as usual and you know I would expect business as usual to come after the midterms as well whatever the outcome may be. So it's almost like uh business as usual Republicans hold control. we continue on as we are. This is talking about politically and then putting in blockers to certain policies and things like that or it gets split and then nothing really changes cuz no one has the power to change anything. So net net it's kind of you've got a degree of confidence. I guess the unknowns are obviously the foreign policy and the outcomes of a lot of other stuff that could feed into to rates. And talking of rates, you once said last time we did an interview related podcast that if you're in an interview and you find yourself in a sticky spot, whatever it is, always bring it back to interest rate. That is the key to unlock the answering of any question. So in this case then, how would you look at that interest rates? Yeah. Yeah. Well, you have the um you have the five W's, don't you? This is a um this is a uh product philosophy coming out of Toyota. Uh basically just asking the question why why why why until you get to the root answer. And again in the world of finance it's usually the fifth why is usually interest rates. So you know again you know more than I do about the world about the hawkish signals coming out of the Fed um and persistent and stubborn inflation. whether we see interest rates rise. They might rise once before the end of the year. Would that dampen the animal spirits of M&A? Probably not. Um but actually, let's um let's bring this episode to a close and I just want I want to kind of move on to your because you spend so much time with young people. I want your I want you to wrap this episode up with one piece of interview advice. We've done all of the theory. We've done all we've equipped you with a load of stuff for your M&A IBD interview. What are you going to go for? >> I think it's um talk about something you're genuinely interested in. So, when it comes to these deals, there's always a temptation to go for something super technical or something super popular. It might be those things, but I think that actually as long as you've got a good competency of technically describing things, the difference is in delivery. And so if you can deliver something which has meaningful enthusiasm and obvious degree of passion to it, I think that's the difference between when you interview 10 people in a day and they all say very similar things. You go, "Yeah, that's the person who I could see working the hours, working with the team, fitting in the culture." So, it's the execution on the delivery, not always. More technical is more value would be my advice. >> Love it. Love it. [laughter] >> All right. Cool. Well, what I'll do is in the show notes, I'll also add a few other links to other related episodes in the library which might also be useful for this time of year. Um, there's also some other ones where we go into individual equity capital market stories as well. So, if you're if you're gunning for that division or that role, we'll also have some of those to share as well. So, Stephen, as always, thank you very much. Thanks and