Heard on the Street: Quantitative Questions from Wall Street Job Interviews

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He has previously written commentary on a wide range of companies for Heard on the Street, including airlines, real estate companies and luxury goods makers. Jane Street’s unorthodoxy goes well beyond its programming language. Mr Granieri is the only remaining founder still at the company, but there is no chief executive, hierarchy or even a clear management committee. Instead, Jane Street almost resembles an anarchist commune, informally led by a group of 30 or 40 senior executives. A smattering of titles have been reluctantly adopted in recent years, but internally they are little used and people rotate around the firm to keep things fresh. Few leave.

We think of ourselves as mainly built for crises,” says Rob Granieri, one of the company’s founders. Nonetheless, Mr Granieri insists there is little triumphalism at Jane Street. “I still walk in every day thinking that we’re still struggling to survive,” he admits. Jane Street traders in New York offices. The company’s forte is lubricating trading in exchange traded funds and other markets Liquidity warningThat extra confidence paid off handsomely when markets were thrown into a tailspin last March, and bond ETFs emerged as a major faultline. Some sceptics argue that only the Federal Reserve’s extraordinary stimulus prevented a disaster for fixed income ETFs, and remain convinced that they could still prove fragile. What now for Wall Street’s least-known trading tycoons? Jane Street made a move into trading directly with investment groups in 2014 — territory historically dominated by big banks. It is now expanding its business in Asia and planning to push more aggressively into equity market options. Nonetheless, the events of 2020 highlight just how big and influential the growing bond ETF universe is, and how vitally important firms like Jane Street are to their functioning. And that has some downsides. The revised 22nd edition contains 239 quantitative questions collected from actual job interviews in investment banking, investment management, and options trading. The interviewers use the same questions year-after-year, and here they are with detailed solutions! This edition also includes 264 non-quantitative actual interview questions, giving a total of more than 500 actual finance job interview questions.

Banks of all sizes are more reluctant to lend, with overall loan growth lagging far behind the long-term average pace. Photo: Clarissa Bonet for The Wall Street Journal Jane Street’s executives say they are well aware of the implications. “We know we are an important part of the efficiency of many of these markets, and that’s something that we feel a huge responsibility for and take very seriously,” Mr Berger says.This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by While almost every trading desk enjoyed a trading bonanza in 2020, Jane Street’s first-half revenues were equivalent to one-seventh of the combined fixed income, commodities and currency trading revenues of all the world’s biggest banks over the same period, according to research group Coalition. It was more than twice the reported earnings of Citadel Securities, the formidable market-maker owned by hedge fund magnate Ken Griffin. Even Charles Schwab, the founder of his eponymous brokerage and once a sceptic of the new breed of higher-speed, modern market-makers like Jane Street, has grown more appreciative of the role they play. “They provide an essential service to the marketplace,” Mr Schwab says. “They provide liquidity by both buying and selling, which is crucially important. You could see the results when markets took a deep dive in March of last year.”

This wasn’t an ETF liquidity story,” says Matt Berger, head of bond trading at Jane Street. “It was liquidity drying up in the underlying fixed income markets.” He previously wrote Ahead of the Tape for the Journal and the Lex column for the Financial Times. He was an analyst and later director of Emerging Europe, Middle East and Africa Equity Research at Credit Suisse. The reason Jane Street has been able to seize such a big role in bond ETF trading is that it straddles the approach of high-speed, algorithm-powered trading firms like Virtu or Jump Trading and the human bond traders that still dominate Wall Street trading desks.

Questions that appeared in (or are likely to appear in) traditional corporate finance job interviews are indicated with a bank symbol in the margin (72 of the 242 quant questions and 196 of the 267 non-quant questions). This makes it easier for corporate finance candidates to go directly to the questions most relevant to them. Most of these questions also appeared in capital markets interviews and quant interviews. So, they should not be skipped over by capital markets or quant candidates unless they are obviously irrelevant. It’s that time of year again: alternate-side winter parking regulations begin Nov. 15. The object is to have residents park in a way that allows the Department of Public Works to clear each side of the street from snow and slush during winter. The regulation calls for all cars to be parked on the correct side of the street from midnight to 5 p.m. as indicated by building numbers in relation to the calendar days. For example, odd-numbered calendar days call for parking on odd sides of the street and even-numbered calendar days call for parking on even numbered sides of the street. The transition period to move your vehicle is from 5 p.m. to 11:59 p.m. No parking is allowed downtown from 1 a.m. through 6:59 a.m.