Best Investment Banking Courses, Reviewed by an Ex-Goldman Sachs Banker

Almost every article ranking investment banking courses is written by somebody who sells one, takes a commission on one, or is quietly building an audience to launch one. That is not a conspiracy, it is just how the category is monetised. I am in the unusual position of having no product here, so this is simply what I think, informed by asking a lot of people who are currently doing the job.

My incentives, stated up front

I have no investment banking course. I have no affiliate relationship with BIWS, Peak Frameworks, Wall Street Prep, or anyone else named on this page. No link here pays me. If you buy something after reading this, I do not know about it and I do not benefit from it.

I am saying that plainly because it changes how you should read everything below. When somebody with a course tells you courses are essential, they may still be right, but you have no way to separate the analysis from the sales pitch. I would rather hand you the analysis and let you check my reasoning.

One more piece of context. Somebody I helped get into banking, who is now on his way to Stanford for an MBA, has been pushing me to build my own course. I thought it was funny at the time. Maybe one day, between other ventures. Building a genuinely good one is hard, and there are enough mediocre ones already.

The short verdict

How I formed this view

I never used a course to recruit. My path was not traditional. I did not catch the finance bug until after I graduated college, which is late, and I broke in through investor relations rather than through a summer analyst pipeline. You can read that whole route in the truth about biotech investor relations and how it eventually bridged into a coverage group at Wells Fargo and then Goldman.

So rather than review products I did not buy, I did the thing I am actually positioned to do. I emailed and called people I know at Goldman Sachs, Evercore, other top tier banks, middle market shops and corporate banking, current friends and old colleagues, and asked what they used and what their own interns are using now. That is close to a hundred people in the industry, though obviously not a hundred responses on this specific question.

The former interns I worked with, who are now associates and vice presidents, went and asked their current interns. That second-hand loop matters, because a course that was excellent in 2016 is not automatically excellent now. BIWS came back as still doing a good job, from people with no reason to flatter it.

I never bought a course when I needed one, and I think that cost me time rather than money. I had analysis paralysis about which one to pick, so I picked none and spent countless nights after a part-time job teaching myself technicals instead.

Breaking Into Wall Street (BIWS)

This is the name that comes up first and most often. When I asked people who are currently at banks, including ones who went through recruiting recently rather than a decade ago, BIWS was the consistent answer. The people who used it think it earned its price. The associates and VPs I asked report their own interns still rate it.

It is expensive. I want to be honest about that rather than wave it away, because for a student the sticker price is real money. What you are buying is sequencing and completeness: a defined path through accounting, valuation, DCF, LBO and merger modeling, with practice sets, rather than a pile of disconnected videos you assemble yourself.

The strongest argument for it is not that the content is unavailable elsewhere. Most of it is, somewhere. The argument is that you will not know which gaps you have until an interviewer finds one, and a structured curriculum closes gaps you did not know to look for.

Peak Frameworks

Peak Frameworks runs an investment banking course and a private equity course. The private equity one is where I hear the most enthusiasm, specifically from people I know who are moving to the buyside and who found the process content genuinely useful rather than generic.

I want to be precise about my basis here, because this is exactly where reviews get dishonest. I have not taken it. I am cosigning what people I trust told me about their own experience, which is weaker evidence than first-hand use and you should weight it accordingly. If your goal is private equity rather than banking for its own sake, it is the one I would look at first.

The free path, and why it worked for me

This was before ChatGPT existed. I used Google. There were free investment banking modeling videos and concept explainers online, and they were well enough to get me where I needed to be. I worked through them at night, after a part-time job, because I had decided late that I wanted finance and had to close the gap fast.

It worked. I do not recommend it as the default, though, and I want to be careful not to romanticise it. It was slow, it was lonely, and I had no way to check whether my understanding was actually complete or merely felt complete.

Structured learning matters. I never used a course, but I genuinely believe one would have quickened my learning. The nights I spent assembling a curriculum out of free videos were nights I could have spent practicing.

There is a moment that sharpened this for me. I was in Miami at the same time as an associate I knew, who was down there for a deal celebration, and we met up. He showed me the paid course he had bought when he was coming up. I was struck by how much content there was, videos and material well beyond what I had cobbled together. It was the first time I understood concretely what I had been doing without.

When a course is the wrong purchase

Course selection matters more than people think, and not only because of money. The wrong course can guide you down the wrong path, teaching you to optimise for something the seats you actually want do not reward.

Before you buy anything, be honest about which of these is actually stopping you:

That last row is the gap almost nobody addresses, and it is the reason this site exists in the shape it does. A course teaches you to build a model. It does not teach you what a real banker deliverable looks like when it lands in front of a board. If you want to fix that, go read the actual documents. I have walked through a real Evercore fairness opinion deck page by page, a Lazard and Evercore deck where you can see exactly what each level of the deal team did, a dual-advisor process at Twitter, and a live DCM term sheet, all sourced from SEC filings with the slides reproduced.

Being able to say something specific and true about a real transaction is worth more in a superday than another practice LBO.

The networking catch-22

Courses matter, but networking is crucial, and the two are locked together in a way that is genuinely unfair.

It is a catch-22. If you have the network, you need the technicals. If you fail the technicals and the behaviorals, your network is dead. And the reverse is just as true.

A referral gets you a conversation. Fumbling the technicals in that conversation does not just cost you the seat, it costs you the person who referred you, because they spent credibility on you. Equally, perfect technicals with nobody willing to pick up the phone is a resume in a pile.

The practical implication is sequencing. Get to technical competence before you spend your best introductions, not after. Your strongest contacts should be used when you can convert.

I get five to ten direct messages a day during recruiting season, largely because Goldman Sachs is on my LinkedIn. I try to help as much as I can and it is not enough, which is part of why I write these guides instead of answering the same question a hundred times. If you want the honest version of what that seat is actually like once you get it, I wrote the prestige myth and what to do if you are burned out in it.

Reading the room

A practical note, because it costs people offers and nobody says it directly. Some candidates ask for a direct referral to Goldman inside ten minutes of a first conversation. That reads badly, and it is more common than you would think. A VP I know at another bank has noticed the same pattern.

I say this with real sympathy, because I have been on the other side of it. When I was coming up, people laughed at me on networking calls. One told me to stay at my job, which at the time was moving boxes in a warehouse. That was before covid. There are kind people on these calls and there are unkind ones, and you cannot control which you get.

The strangest one I had went like this. A guy kept messaging me on LinkedIn after connecting. I offered to help and gave him my availability for a coffee chat. When he joined, having just landed an incoming internship, he laughed at me, said I looked too young to have done investment banking, and treated the whole thing as though I were not legitimate because of how I looked. He told me people at Goldman Sachs typically look the part, and that I did not look like a student athlete.

It is the most awkward interaction I have had in this industry, and the claim is nonsense. The groups I worked in were very diverse, which made the conversations better and mattered for a long list of reasons beyond that. If you take one thing from this section, take this: the person on the other end of a networking call is evaluating judgment, not just interest, and both sides of the table can get it wrong.

Common questions

If you want to go deeper on the paths themselves rather than the study material, the most useful next reads are how much target schools actually matter, what boutique banking really is, and corporate banking as a route in. If you would rather study the work itself, the case study library walks through real banker decks from SEC filings.