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Morgan Stanley interview questions, the definitive list

We've looked at the interview questions at Goldman Sachs. We've looked at the interview questions of J.P. Morgan. And we've looked at how body language in an interview might kill your chances of landing a job

But what if you're interviewing with Morgan Stanley? Based upon questions Morgan Stanley interviewees have been asked in 2022, the below list include the kinds of things you can expect across IBD, sales and trading and technology roles. Remember, don't forget the soft skill questoins are as important as the technical. 

Fit / Competency questions from Morgan Stanley interviews

Walk me through you resume.

Tell me about yourself.

What are Morgan Stanley’s corporate values?

Why are you a good fit for Morgan Stanley?

Why did you apply to Morgan Stanley?

What can you add to Morgan Stanley?

Tell us about your qualifications.

What are your future goals?

Why are you the best person for this position?

Give an example of how you handled a difficult situation and the outcome.

When was a time you worked well in a group? Describe it.

What is your biggest professional accomplishment?        

Tell me about your work history.

Have you ever dealt with difficult people? How did you do it.

What made you interested in Morgan Stanley?

Tell me about a struggle at school that you overcame.

What do you like about your current position?

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

Tell me about a time when you solved a conflict.

Tell us something unusual about yourself.

What do you think about working with people from different backgrounds?

Describe yourself in three words.

Give me an example of a challenge you had to overcome.

How would you bring new ideas and perspective to Morgan Stanley?

Why did you leave your previous job?

How would you sell Morgan Stanley?

Give me an example of a time you’ve been wrong about something.

What is your greatest accomplishment.

How do you manage your workload when you are faced with several projects and deadlines?

Tell me about your strengths and weaknesses.

Describe a time when you have been able to demonstrate flexibility?

Tell me about a time you were able to keep a friendly demeanour with someone who was upset or angry. Describe the situation, your actions, and the outcome.

Tell me about a time that you used technology to make a decision

What would you say is your greatest leadership quality?

Tell me about a time you've been innovative.

What's unique about Morgan Stanley?

What is one thing not on your resume that you would like us to know?

What are your long term career goals.

Describe a time when you had to make a big decision with limited information.

If you could describe yourself in one word, what would it be?

Use 3 adjectives to describe yourself and explain why you used these 3 adjectives.

What would you do if another team was trying to push more work onto your team?

One of our values is giving back. How does that principle apply to you?

Describe a time when you made a decision based on limited information.

What can you bring to this company?

IBD questions from Morgan Stanley interviews 

What is a DCF valuation?

Why investment banking?

What deals in the space have you been following?

What is the common debt-to-equity ratio?

What is balance sheet equity?

Walk me through a LBO.

What are some common valuation methods?

How would you value a coffee shop

Describe some trends in M&A deals recently.

Explain the revenue structure of the last company you worked at.

Explain WACC.

Explain levered and unlevered beta.

Tell me about an industry that is impacted by Covid.

Markets questions from Morgan Stanley interviews

How do you keep track of the market?

What are the Greeks and what are second order Greeks?

Explain a credit default swap and an interest rate swap.

Why markets at Morgan Stanley?

How would an increase in the price of coffee effect the price of gold?

Pitch us a trade idea.

Why do you want to pursue a career in trading?

Whats the difference between GO bonds and revenue bonds?

What is VaR?

Talk about a recent market news headline in detail.

Explain the difference between contango and forwardation.

What do you know about bonds?

Explain how bond maturities work.

Describe main types of financial derivative instruments.

What are futures, forward and options and how do they differ?

What is the difference between bonds and stocks?

If you had a million dollars, what would you invest in?

Tell me about the current market environment.

How might future trends in the field of sustainability affect company revenues?

Tech / Quantitative questions from Morgan Stanley interviews

Explain a design pattern.

What is the smallest path in a m*n matrix from top left to bottom right?

What are the responsibilities of the Operating system?

What is dependency injection in angular? What are the benefits?

What is the Monty Hall problem? Explain how you would solve it.

How do you create a service now dashboard?

What is your preferred database?

Write a function that converts a string to an integer.

Tell us why you are interested in Morgan Stanley Technology and what unique perspective you can bring to the program?

Tell us about a tech trend that will be important in the next year.

How would you place locks to be threadsafe?

Write a chess player program.

What are the data structures in R?

How would you debug code?

How do you implement a hit counter that increments every time some accesses a page?

Given a file with multiple records, write a program to read, process and aggregate the records.

What is object-orientated programming?

Given a list of strings [“text”, “tet”, “xtet”, “tte”, “ttex”] group all the anagrams together and return it.

Given 2 arrays, find common numbers in them and return in the form of an arrayList.

Start from a blank edit and write a function hat given a depth, calculates how many direct friends someone has. If depth is 2 - you have to return the direct friends of the person plus the direct friends of all of his direct friends. You don't have to run it, so don't worry about implementing anything outside of what you use.

From a blank editor write a function that calculates all possible multiplications between a List of Positions and a List of Scenarios - we do not care about what these are and how the calculation works.

What is CLR?

What is dispose?

What are SOLID principles?

Describe the 5 essential necessities for developing a test automation framework.

Write a multi-threading c++ code to print numbers in a given range by two threads in increasing order with condition that first thread should print odd number and second should print even number.

Write a runtime efficient loop in Java. 

What is a domain name server?

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AUTHORSarah Butcher Global Editor
  • Ni
    Nicolas Bourbaki
    23 August 2022

    >What are the responsibilities of the Operating system?

    To operate a system?
    Next question?

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