Top 3 Financial News Sources to Prep for Banking

June 01, 2025

I skimmed three news sources every morning to prep for my first banking superday.

They grilled me on nitty gritty details of interest rate trends, recent deals & market conditions…

But this morning routine made all those questions a cake walk -

Since I already had well-thought-out, cleanly structured answers prepared for everything they asked.

As a freshman, every upperclassmen told us to “start reading the news” but never showed us how.

Nobody has time to read the whole WSJ cover to cover every day -

You just have to know

(A) Which sources are relevant for banking and

(B) How to skim each efficiently & take notes for interviews

(#1) TRANSACTED DAILY NEWSLETTER

You’re guaranteed to get asked some variation of this question in every single interview

“Can you walk me through a recent deal you’ve been following? And do you think it was a good one?”

I was always told “recent” means any deal within the past two months.

The Transacted newsletter is the best way to keep a pulse on deals happening every day.

Fortune’s Term Sheet is another newsletter that’s basically a carbon copy of Transacted.

Both Transacted & Term Sheet start out with a deep-dive on some industry-related news event -

But you can just skip right to the bottom to the section titled

You can ignore the “Venture” & “Fundraising” sections of Transacted.

In Term Sheet, focus on the sections titled “Private Equity” & “Exits”.

Every week, I picked one deal I was naturally interested in and took notes on all the small details.

I kept a log of these in a Word Doc I could easily pull up anytime I had an interview coming up.

Below is an example of one that would’ve caught my eye from Transacted.

But Transacted and Term Sheet don’t include all the specific details you need to know for interviews.

To find those, you have to track down the press release for each deal on the PR NEWSWIRE website.

Within each press release, go straight to the “Transaction Details” section.

It’ll look something like this

You should write down the following details for each.

  • Purchase Price: Dollar amount, Valuation multiple, Premium paid

  • Financing: Percent mix cash / stock / debt, Names of lenders

  • Advisors: Lead investment bank on buy side and sell side

  • Dates: Both announcement and closing

  • Rationale: Motivation for both buyer and seller

  • Background: Recent performance of each company

  • Deal Context: Anything unusual with the negotiations / agreement?

(#2) MORNING BREW DAILY NEWSLETTER

Morning Brew’s the easiest way to follow high-level macro trends in the world of business.

It’ll help you answer questions like the ones below - all of which I’ve been asked in real interviews.

  • “Can you tell me where the 10-Year Treasury is trading right now?”

  • “Where did the S&P 500 (or Dow / Nasdaq) close at yesterday?”

  • “What’s your view on interest rates right now?"

  • "How do you think the recent movements will impact the markets and M&A?”

The only section I paid attention to every single day was the one titled “Markets” that looks like this

For every interview, I prepped talking points for

(A) Stock Market Trends and

(B) Interest Rate Movements

I’d sit down and make an outline with six or seven bullets for each -

Basically just organizing my thoughts on

(1) What the main drivers have been

(2) How they’ve impacted the M&A environment and

(3) Forming a well-educated opinion on where I think they’ll end up moving forward

(#3) WALL STREET JOURNAL

You probably didn’t realize you get a free subscription to the WSJ through your school.

Type your school’s name into the link above to check.

I took an investment banking class in college led by a former partner from a top bank in CHI.

He gave us WSJ quizzes every week to make sure we were up to date on current events in M&A.

Here are some example questions from those quizzes - all of which are fair game for interviews.

  • “Which car rental company has recently been taken public again, after its business had collapsed and delisted at the beginning of the pandemic last year?”

  • “What are two reasons that equity markets have seen indices setting all-time highs?”

  • “What conglomerate has recently split into three public companies? What three industries will these businesses be classified under?”

  • “What major food and snack corporation recently acquired both Dot’s Homestyle Pretzels and Pretzels Inc.? What was the total transaction value?

He showed us how bankers efficiently skim the journal in practice -

Only paying attention to headlines & stories that’re actually relevant to banking.

Here’s how to read the WSJ like a banker.

(STEP 1) Open WSJ in Print Mode Online

  • First click “Print Edition” at top of page

  • Then press “READ WSJ PRINT EDITION” button on bottom left as seen in picture below

  • Once open it should look like this

(STEP 2) Skim Headlines Under “A1 / Main” Front Page & “A2 / US News”

(STEP 3) Click B1. Skim Headlines in “Business & Finance” Section (all of B__)

(STEP 4) Open & Skim Full Articles for Two to Three M&A-Related Topics

  • Here’s an example of something M&A-related I’d click on

For current events, I always had a few discussion points ready to go for every interview.

I’d just choose a few of the top stories that happened in the two weeks leading up to an interview -

And organize my thoughts on each situation, similar to how I approached the “Stock Market” and “Interest Rate” answers above.

Cheers 🥂

- Jack