Optiver: Their first step is 8 mins , 80 questions MCQ math test made of simple arithmetic questions designed to assess your mental math speed and accuracy. Read about the specific organization with whom you are interviewing to understand their clients and the services, and the philosophy that guides their practice A preliminary quant interpersonal interview is typically 45-60 minutes, and may be in person or virtual. For in-person interviews, you may be handed a pencil and paper or markers for a whiteboard for your calculations. For virtual interviews, you might work on a shared virtual whiteboard or Google Doc. If the month was Mar, Sep or Dec, then M would still not be able to work out the birthday by eliminating the 2s and 7s.

Although each company will have its own interview protocol, here are steps you can take to prepare for quant interviews regardless of the organization: Based on my experience working and interviewing with these firms, I made a list of resources and some interview tips to help students prepare for Quant and Finance interviews. Many prop trading(eg KCG, SIG) , quant trading(Two Sigma, Jane Street, WorldQuant) and market making focused firms (Optiver, IMC, Flow, Akuna) follow this pattern.Please note, the pattern of interviews may change with time, it’s recommended to do your due diligence about the companies you are interviewing with. Math/Logic/Numerical tests: Here is a short but interesting article on Expression Template that examplifies some basic usage of C++ templates.With the initial interview largely assessing analytical skills, subsequent interviews may focus on in-depth quant concepts related to the industry and to broader personality characteristics, such as how you weigh a given set of options, how you manage your time and why you’re drawn to working in that particular industry. How should I prepare? Practice I expect the calculus and linear algebra review to go smoothly. I recall most of this content so the preparation process will simply entail solving the questions from the prep book and actively seeking tough questions from my old textbooks. Materials In this first module, I will do a comprehensive refresher of probability and statistics and practice sliding window algorithm questions on leetcode. My understanding of Probability is decent as I have taken multiple courses that have covered the subject matter. Materials

comments on the usefullness: 5 for fresh graduate, max(2, 5 - #years of experience) for experienced hires. Basic Also expect questions on current finance news, levels of major world indices, forex, major events that moved markets over the last year, what trade would you make in such and such situation etc.Try writing C++ using only objects. Templates are nice to have as well. Use Design Patterns whenever you can. Most Frequently Asked Questions on Quant Interviews, 2nd Edition (2019) by Dan Stefanica, Radoš Radoičić and Tai-Ho Wang Many quant interviews and big tech interviews have been known to ask estimation-based questions. These include ‘how much should you charge to wash every window in Seattle’ and the like. There is an abundance of questions available online for practice. These will be the final and lowest priority aspect of my interview prep.

If the birthday would have been in June or Dec there would have been a chance that day-knowing C would have known it, because there are unique possible days-of-months in the list for possible birthdays in those months (Dec 2 and June 7). The only way the month-knowing person referred to as "you" in the problem could know that there is no chance for C, is that the months are neither June nor Dec. Be prepared to devote time over a number of weeks to become fluent in financial terms and proficient with the different types of quant interview questions Try using a build system, do not use an IDE. I prefer the naive makefile and the advanced CMake. (My personal view is Autotools is unpretty and out-dated.) IDEs are nice to work with, but helpless for interview prep. Quantitative Portfolio Management (Incredible book with interview questions scattered throughout which will also give you a highly developed ability to discuss statistical arbitrage and explain most of the core quant finance topics relevant to hedge fund/ asset management) Analysis of Financial Time Series * I personally like other books more, but this book exposes one to the most number of time series models.

Examples of quant interview questions

comments on the usefullness: 5 for high frequency or algo trader/researcher, pricing quants (model validation roles), start arb strategists. The interview process for a quantitative developer focuses heavily on algorithms and data structures with bits of math brain teasers dropped in. A quantitative trader interview is the complement of a quant-dev interview: math brain teaser heavy with bits of algorithm and data structures dropped in. I have concocted a hybrid interview prep curriculum to ensure I am prepared for both interviews. The benefit is that practicing the mathematical brain-teasers along with algorithms and data structures will prepare me for machine learning engineer interviews at big tech companies. Therefore, I believe this interview prep curriculum to be a sound hedge that will increase my market value regardless of whether I make it into a hedge fund or not. Quantitative Developer Archetype