About
The interview advice was written for someone else's desk.
Most of what ranks for a buy-side interview search is private equity and hedge fund material with the vertical swapped. Both of those interviews test whether you would do the deal. Asset management asks something else: whether you can hold a position inside a portfolio, defend it against a stated benchmark, and keep a client who is free to leave. We report what that actually looks like, firm by firm, instead of reusing a case built for a different room.
The problem this site was built for
Asset management employs far more people than the buyout and hedge fund worlds it keeps getting filed under in career content, and that mismatch is a large part of why the searchable advice fits so badly. A guide built for one of those two rooms gets relabelled and handed to an asset management candidate anyway, jargon and numbers intact, because nobody checked whether the exercise was actually the same one.
It is not. A long-only interviewer already has your money in the fund; the question is not whether to do the deal but whether you can hold one view inside a portfolio that has to stay diversified, defend a stock or a bond against the benchmark it gets measured against, and do it in front of a client who reads the quarterly letter and can move the mandate elsewhere if the answer is weak.
What we report
Firm by firm: how the manager actually makes its money, whether the seat sits in equity research, fixed income or manager selection, what the pitch or the portfolio review actually asks, how a return gets broken into allocation and selection once someone asks you to defend it, and what the seat pays once there is no carry to argue about. A firm that has simply never made any of that public gets a guide that admits as much, not one that fills the gap with a plausible-sounding guess.
A benchmark travels with every return we cite
A return means little on its own. Where a guide states a fund's performance, an allocation call or an attribution figure, the benchmark and the period sit next to it, taken from the manager's own factsheet or KIID rather than a marketing line.
A second reader checks the logic, not just the prose
Before a firm guide goes up, someone who did not write it reopens every source and asks whether it still says what the sentence claims. The exercise repeats each time the guide is revised.
No manager or platform pays for a mention
This site has no commercial relationship with any asset manager, index provider or platform named on it, and never charges one for space. A recommendation of a paid tool says so, plainly, in the sentence that makes it.
Editorial direction here sits with Rowan Ashby — a pen name. How corrections are handled is set out in full in our editorial standards. Asset Management Interview Prep is operated by the company named in our Impressum.
Start with the guides.
Five guides across the managers, the routes in, the interview itself, pay, and the fund structures that decide what the job actually is.