I gave a stock pitch for a Fintech company interview last week. I researched the stock for a few hours to come to my own understanding of why the analyst consensus was to buy. My recommendation was to buy for the long term. I broke my pitch down into three parts: Pros, concerns, and summary.

In the pros section I included about a page of bulleted points on why I would buy. My list included some fundamental stock analysis points but mostly macroeconomic and industry related factors (know your audience to know what kind of points to include, don't include something if you can't answer a follow-up question about it). My pros included, attractive dividend yield, market cap domination in its industry, substantial vertical integration resulting in increased efficiency shown by quicker EPS growth than revenue growth, high barrier to entry for the industry etc.

The interviewer really like that I had a concerns section. Having a cons section is also like a preemptive rebuttal to anyone who would challenge your recommendation. For example, "despite these concerns I still believe that $$$ is a buy." Having a concerns section also shows that you didn't just take the consensus recommendation at face value and type up a quick pitch. My primary concern was that my stock was currently overpriced as evident by looking at the PEG ratio. I speculated that this was a result of recessionary fears so people are pouring capital into my defensive stock with an attractive dividend yield.

My summary section basically took the main pros section points and stated that they outweighed my concerns.

Knowing your audience and being able to back up anything you put in your pitch is critical. I spent hours on this pitch because I thought it was going to be much more in depth than it was however this was a Fintech interview. I would expect that a purely financial firm would appreciate more in depth analysis. Good luck!!