Restructuring Interviews

The Overview Guide is 101-pages detailing:

  ✓ The day-to-day work you should expect

  ✓ What concepts and terms you absolutely must know

  ✓ What kind of deliverables exist in RX (with examples)

This guide walks through 143 of the RX-specific question and answers you need to know. Ranging from contextual questions about how RX operates in practice to the specifics of how we think about distressed companies. These aren't one-line answers, they often stretch for multiple paragraphs.

Knowing RX-specific answers sets you far apart. But you still need to know the traditional technicals. I've put together 96 of the most popular technicals (most having RX-specific spin on them). You still need to know your accounting and valuation for an interview (even if it's not as relevant in RX). This will ensure you know how traditional technicals are viewed through a RX mindset.

This guide contains 145 questions and answers developed partly from the Bible of distressed debt: Distressed Debt Analysis by Moyer. This will teach you the finer details around the bankruptcy code and how to think about distressed companies. 

This guide contains 78 questions and answers developed partly from Distress Investing by Martin Whitman (the legendary distressed hedge fund manager). These questions are slightly more practical and accessible and I've sprinkled this guide with more contextual questions throughout.

This guide contains 108 questions and answers developed partly from A Pragmatist's Guide to Leveraged Finance by Kricheff. These questions will give you a practical, fulsome understanding of capital structures and debt. 

Creating and understanding capitalization tables are the most important tasks for a new entrant to RX or distressed debt. So much so that in some interviews you'll be given cap tables and asked questions about them. Here I give two examples along with Q&A.

This guide goes over six "ground rules" for RX networking along with 18 restructuring-specific networking questions that are highly impressive to ask. These questions will help you stand out, show off your knowledge of the industry, and get that first-round interview.

The Serta Simmons restructuring was one of the most talked about (and controversial!) of 2020. This 23 page case study walks through how Serta's restructuring demonstrates the two major trends in RX solutions over the past few years and why they will matter for years to come.

This 18 page guide contains some more obscure and difficult restructuring interview questions that may pop up in your interviews. In total there are just 16 questions in the guide, so I do a deep dive to fully explain the concepts and theories behind these questions.

These are some of the most conceptually difficult and rare questions to get in an interview (although since I put out this guide they've become more popular -- oops!). This nine page guide contains 14 questions where I try to build up your intuition by going over progressively more in-depth examples.

This 24 page guide contains a mix of questions that came up during the '21-22 recruiting cycle, along with some trickier questions that I developed to try to build up your understanding of certain thorny topics (as per usual, my answers to some of these questions are several pages long).

This 15 page guide builds up your bond math intuition from scratch. In the end, there are only a few kinds of bond math questions asked in interviews. But I've added a number of my own (very long) questions and answers here that will (hopefully!) give you a much more airtight understanding.

In some superdays you'll need to do a little case study. When many hear this their blood begins running a bit cold. But these case studies just require stitching together some core restructuring concepts. In this 20 page guide we'll walk through the most common type of case and, as per usual, dive deeper than you'd ever need to in an interview.

I created the original Serta Guide in 2020 in the immediate aftermath of their notorious, novel, and (some believe) nefarious out-of-court transaction. However, a lot has happened since then (including Serta filing in 2023!). So in this 28 page guide I dive deeper into the mechanics of Serta’s uptier, the drop-down that was (unsuccessfully) pitched by Apollo, et al., the in-court fights that took place upon filing, and how it was all resolved (for now…).

The rationale behind creating both Serta guides was to introduce the two trends that have loomed large in restructuring over the last few years: non-pro rata uptiers and drop-downs. However, in 2023 a new trend has emerged in the form of double-dips. In this 35 page guide I break down (in much more detail than you’d ever need to know for interviews) the mechanics of double-dips and the four double-dip transactions that have occurred thus far (At Home, Sabre, Trinseo, and Wheel Pros).

In keeping with my annual tradition, this 41 page guide contains a mix of some more obscure or difficult questions that came up over the last recruiting cycle and then a bunch of questions that I created more or less as an excuse to delve into the weeds a bit more on certain concepts (although, as a fair warning, often the interview-style questions that I create have a funny way of becoming actual interview questions in future cycles...).

This six-page guide, written the week after the Serta decision dropped, discuses the implications (or lack thereof) of the Fifth Circuit’s ramblings and is much more of an editorial than an explainer. It highlights, as we began to see as 2025 progressed, the more limited practical impact of the
decision on uptiers writ large but also how there are aspects of the decision that should still cause concern.  

While I’m typically reluctant to write at length on macro themes – partially because what’s written is often outdated within a few weeks – this five-page note is an exception. It was written in March of 2025, as the first fits of the tariff tantrum unfolded, to memorialize my best estimate for how things would unfold and the knock-on ramifications for credit (all of which has held up pretty well).

A theme I wrote about significantly in 2025 – and that has come even more to the fore in 2026 – is what I’ve called the context-specific value of holding out. In this 12-page guide I walk through one of AMC’s recent transactions (one of the many they’ve done over the last few years) and the litigation from a small set of holdouts that resulted (which ended with a whimper, not a bang).

In this 12-page guide, I take a little detour and discuss an interview with Anchorage’s Patrick McGrath and use it as an excuse to tie together a number of themes we’ve discussed, elaborate further on some of McGath’s points, and walk through the LME done by EmployBridge, an Apollo PortCo (fair warning: it’s so equitable that it’s enough to make one sick).

While it hasn’t been that long since I published the Double-Dip Guide – in the wake of the initial raft of double-dips that occurred in 2023 – what we’ve seen since has not only been a continuation of double-dips but also some developments vis-à-vis that initial raft who completed them. In this 15-page guide we go through Trinseo’s latest LME which, as the name of the guide implies, doubles down on the double-dip structure we previously discussed.

While there’s been much ado about coops over the last 12-24 months, in this 11-page guide I discuss them in a more practical context – alongside how they fit into what I call the “new restructuring pipeline” – and then proceed to vent my ceaseless irritation with modern coop structures and those that view them as some kind of magic elixir (to this end, I outline five ways in which coops will be, or at least should be, contorted in the future).

In this eight-page guide, I return to two of my long-standing bête noires – coops and DQ lists – and discuss WHP Global’s attempt to prohibit the formation of coops alongside the shenanigans of NEP Group vis-à-vis their expansive DQ list (a who’s who of opportunistic funds that’s comprehensive enough that if you weren’t included and aren’t a current holder of their debt, you’d be forgiven for being a bit offended).

To continue our discussion of all things coops, in this 11-page guide I discuss WBD’s June 2025 split announcement which caused confusion and consternation on many fronts – but especially, at least in credit markets, vis-à-vis the introduction of a non-boycott provision (that, as I argued at the time, was misunderstood for what it was and what it could be but nevertheless led to a kind of mass hysteria in certain corners).

The last time I wrote about Pretium, the Clearlake-backed rigid plastic container manufacture, it was after their 2023 uptier. Because, by the standards of the time and against Clearlake’s somewhat misunderstood reputation for aggressive maneuvers, it was notable for its softness. In this 10-page guide I return to reassess where Pretium is and muster a defense of the much-maligned Clearlake since they’re often one step ahead when it comes to their approach to restructuring situations.

This nine-page guide was written in Q1 2025 before Cision stumbled and bumbled and backed their way into a transaction. However, the true purpose of this guide is to illustrate the real danger in finding oneself bound – through a sloppily crafted coop – to a bunch of intransigent par holders (for a myriad of reasons – not least that there’s sometimes the possibility of a third-party swooping in to take advantage of the group’s inevitable disfunction...).

This 14-page guide, written after Cision completed their transaction, walks through all the specifics – from the continual breakdown in talks to the final economics – alongside the broader issues that Cision brings to the fore and the desperate need for opportunistic funds to reassess their priors (read: return to a more aggressive posture) less they continue to find themselves lost in the middle and shackled to the whims of unsophisticated holders.

While an under-the-radar transaction when it was completed, STG was aggressive in structure if not in the amount of economics shifted to participants (read: it was a convoluted concoction). And while most didn’t blink at the holdouts left behind when the transaction was done, the litigation that began in 2025 from non-participants has made STG a bit more notable and illustrates a few of the themes I’ve harped on over and over. In this 28-page guide we go through it all.

This course is aimed primarily at those looking to break into restructuring investment banking. However, it contains hundreds of questions, examples, and more making it relevant for anyone interested in distressed debt or restructuring (e.g. credit investors, PE associates, etc.)

The course is entirely digital. Immediately after ordering you will receive an e-mail with your unqiue link to access the member's area where all the content is housed. You can then get started right away. Courses can only be accessed by one person and downloads are tracked. 

If for whatever reason you're unhappy with the course, a refund will be made. However, hundreds have bought the course and no refunds have been asked for yet, which I'm incredibly proud of.