Investment Banking Interview Prep: The M&A Deals You Need to Know in 2026

0:00This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed Sponsored Jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Hello and welcome back to the Market Maker podcast and today we are dusting off our rucksacks and polishing our shoes because that's right, it's back to school.

0:40In 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 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 back-to-back interviews so this episode will give you almost hopefully everything you need to sound smart about the state of M &A.

1:19We'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, if you can sound anywhere close to Stephen, 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 podcasts that's definitely not 45 minutes i can i can sell myself we all know that's not not a true state of affairs But let's get into it then, I guess, starting with the hottest topic that people will be applying to, which is M &A.

2:12So where do you want to go globally or by sector with this part? Yeah, so 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 give you some solid foundations.

3:04So 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, we're 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$3 trillion worth of deals in the first half of the year alone, with Q2 posting$1.6 trillion worth of M &A transactions, a quarterly record.

4:03So 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, 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 has been a breakout year so far, but a breakout year for whom and why?

4:58yeah so one of these 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.

5:43Unilever Foods combination with McCormick in a$44.8 billion reverse Morris Trust, all about tax incentives, worth taking a look at that. GIP and EQT's$33.4 billion acquisition of AES Corporation, all about AI infrastructure. Remember NextEra and its$67 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 and NVIDIA's acquisition of that company for$13 billion. Kind of goes back to this capital as power argument.

6:37There 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 not winners stagnating a little bit or falling a little bit by the wayside. The K-shaped economy, the Mag7, 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$100 billion of free cash flow every single year, it doesn't make any sense for them to go out and do a 500 million dollar deal it's not going to move the needle it's not worth the time they have to do a 20 billion dollar 10 billion dollar 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.

7:43You have to go through the same process. So 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? It's 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 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.

8:28I need to be buying$10 billion companies,$15 billion companies 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 phenomenon. 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 123.

9:14And 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 over 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 five minutes into the interview. Rule of three, number one, large cap firms buying AI capability 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.

10:03And when we talk about energy deals, when we talk about infrastructure deals. This is all the AI build out, 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 SaaSpocalypse or the apparent SaaSpocalypse and these highfalutin 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?

11:03What 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 gangbusters at the moment. So would that be an appropriate thing to also highlight? Yeah. And the interview question might well be something like, 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.

11:50That's a bit of a curious one because anyone that's only been in the market for the last 10, 12 years would think that interest rates are actually quite high. I've put a little interest rate chart in our notes. And thankfully, 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 stable-ish. So you don't want to do M &A during an interest rate hiking cycle. you don't want to do M &A when inflation is running out of control or when you can't predict the future.

12:48So stable, predictable-ish interest rates are a good conducive 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 covid was 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 the uh the appointments within the regulators and the kind of removal of lina khan and and all of this trust busting 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 Right.

14:01If 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 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 i didn't 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 a hundred dollars to two hundred dollars 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.

15:01It's just 2x, 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 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 and I put my house on the market and I ignore all the estate agents to say this house is worth you know a million quid and I say no I'm going to put the market for 3 million quid, right?

15:49That's what I want to sell this house for. Of course, no one's going to buy this house because it's not worth 3 million quid. The bid-ask spread is just, you know, it's 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 pounds, the bid-ask spread is much lower and we can probably find the middle ground. In 2023-2024, when M &A deal volume and values were very low, the bid-asked spread, what the sellers were willing to sell for versus what the buyers were willing to buy for, the bid-asked spread was just too high to meet in the middle.

16:32This 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. I can come to the table and go, hey, 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. There's a conversation to be had. that drives more action than almost all of the other stuff that i've said and 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 visible, highly traded market.

17:42It'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 similar-ish 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 the allure of London as they see the multiple valuations, they can just get pickups 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 we were getting in a little bit more depth in an interview.

18:24This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed Sponsored Jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Get a$75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. 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.

19:36So 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 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 Europe and certainly the UK coming, you know, being bought by American companies that just have high valuations and can take advantage of this arbitrage.

20:25Okay, well, 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. So rank these five sectors in order based on deal value. Healthcare, utility and energy, finance, real estate, tech. 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.

21:22We'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 a deal value which is up significantly from 2025 almost completely down to the 250 billion dollars 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 year-on-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 fifth position.

22:20So obviously this is all a technology play. My kind of caveat or my critique of that is everything's technology. There are different types of technology and technology is now such a broad, wide bucket that I can't even contemplate. If I'm a tech investor, what does that even mean? right 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 the ibd investment banking and they don't know all of the division of duties amongst the different 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 why is that still a thing outdated by about 20 years 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 speciality 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.

23:57So if you're a slightly smaller, maybe a boutique organization, either you would focus on a particular sector, maybe you're a brilliant mining company, M &A boutique, and maybe that's one of your three or four specialisms and you've managed to poach the best mining banker from Goldman Sachs and built that franchise or built that team around that individual contributor, 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 an upstart trying to compete with the likes of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, etc.

24:42So yeah, you got to get specialisms. 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 differences between this year and last year yeah so goldman sachs number one as you'd expect 1.4 trillion dollars worth of deals done picking up almost 3 billion dollars worth of fees that's a 33 percent 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.

25:36So 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 Centervue partners. So number 10 in terms of deal value, number five in terms of fee income. Really, really interesting. So So therefore, and this is a 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, Ant, is already well underway. 30 internships coming live as of the 1st of September, a couple of weeks ago.

26:17I would target, this is Darius's advice, bulge brackets, as you would probably suggest. tech-focused boutiques such as Catalyst, Evercore, Centervue, which are a little bit leaner, but getting a lot of deal volume. And then maybe infrastructure-focused investment banks, Nomura's a very good one for that. Standard Chartered, more kind of focused on East and Asia as well. JP Morgan's natural resources team. 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 daris is uh kind of passing on that that knowledge i love that like namura greentech standard charter jp Morgan's natural resources team.

27:21I think those, 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, AI inflation to the application volume numbers, it's 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. 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 volume is coming from, and then to the more narrow application pool.

28:04So it's kind of like, it's such obvious when someone tells you, but I would imagine that Darius is probably one in, I don't know, he's a minority group, but they're the ones who smash it, right? Yeah, and there's always that tendency just to spray and pray and write generic cover letters and just go for, oh yeah, I've applied for 300 jobs and I've got zero. 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.

28:55That'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 well thought through, very, very strategic companies. In the same way as if I'm applying to jobs, I want to be spending 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.

29:39It 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 area of finance. And yeah, I know people have lots of comments about the volume versus the 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 ban.

30:15Yeah, exactly. And one of the great things about humans, especially young people, is that you can get curious about almost anything, right? 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 really care about data centers or do I really care about infrastructure? If you're a curious person, spend three 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 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 So what would your episode be that you enjoyed that we've done that you think could be a good talking point for an interview?

31:24Yeah, 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 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 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.

32:19Ant, 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 six 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. 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 mna 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 build out an AI investment, right?

33:32This whole boom, this whole M &A boom 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 six 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 episode is out. So we might have to do a special episode on that. We might already be late to the party. But look, 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 revenue perspective. Just to put your feet to the fire, what's your intuition, do you think, about what it actually looks like under the bonnet?

34:26I think that's a fair... Feet to fire. I think that it will find a way to prove profitability through lots of very, very clever advanced agreements and machinations with some of the other firms in this space. I think the revenue growth story is real. I think it will be clearly extraordinary and much, much more impressive than a SpaceX story. No question about it. 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 of just the sheer pent-up excitement about Anthropic. And it will suck all of the dollars that OpenAI would have got, right?

35:18Can I just ask, because you are like the strategy guy when it comes to these business types of deals. My question is that I talk to a few people who both use it and are close to people in the business of Anthropic. And a lot of it that comes back is whilst we as the end user get our touch point, our interaction with Anthropic is the software that we use. It's Claude and so on. But whenever I talk to people who either work there or know people who work there or using, let's say, some of their training courses and certificate certifications, it seems almost shambolic in terms of the actual infrastructure that supports then a business.

36:07at what point is it that the technology is so spectacular 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 feel 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 discussion between when does a lab become a business? So an AI lab, Anthropic, an AI lab, OpenAI, 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?

37:00And Anthropic, to all intents and purposes, has done a much better job than OpenAI. moving from a lab to a business, but it is a culture change, a massive, massive culture change. 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 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, it doesn't really matter.

37:48The 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 Anthropik'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 that's you know that's a death knell 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 because the AI thing is so dominant, the midterms.

38:34So 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 neck and neck, 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans. And again, it's interesting because you would always think, gosh, Republicans, 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.

39:19So 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 gangbusters 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 that's happened over the last couple of years.

40:08And 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 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 because no one has the power to change anything. So net net, it's kind of, you've got a degree of confidence, I guess.

40:48The unknowns are obviously the foreign policy and the outcomes of a lot of the other stuff that could feed into 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 whys 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 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 work 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 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.

42:35It 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 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.

43:33There's also some other ones where we go into individual equity capital market stories as well. So 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, Ed.

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