Guide to Wall Street Quant Jobs for IITians





Summary of the deck

This is a short guide for IITians preparing for Wall Street quantitative finance jobs, adapted from Ashwin Rao's presentation at Stanford and general interview preparation for quantitative analysis roles.

What is quantitative finance? Roles at large banks and hedge funds, in trading businesses that involve quant analysis. The work requires advanced skills in math, statistics and computer science, and a sound understanding of trading markets.

Example job titles: derivatives trader, trading desk quant strategist, derivatives modeler / econometric modeler, algorithmic trading quant, analytics developer.

Firms that have hired at IITs: Goldman Sachs (FICC), Morgan Stanley (Strats and Modeling), Tower Research Capital, and WorldQuant (Millennium Partners).

Interview preparation. The interviews are mostly technical and the topics fall under three heads:

  • Mathematics: probability (Probability, Random Variables and Stochastic Processes by Papoulis; Fifty Challenging Problems in Probability with Solutions) and engineering mathematics (Advanced Engineering Mathematics by Kreyszig; Linear Algebra and Its Applications by Gilbert Strang; What Is Mathematics? by Richard Courant)
  • Computer Science: algorithms (Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson and Rivest; Algorithms by Robert Sedgewick) and C++ (C++: The Complete Reference; The C++ Programming Language by Stroustrup; Programming in C++ by Cohoon and Davidson)
  • Brain Teasers: Mathematical Puzzles: A Connoisseur's Collection by Peter Winkler; Entertaining Mathematical Puzzles by Martin Gardner; Mathematical Puzzles of Sam Loyd

Sample C++ interview questions from the deck:

  • What is the difference between a pointer and a reference?
  • What does it mean to declare a function or variable as static?
  • What is the difference between a struct and a class in C++?
  • What is the purpose of a constructor/destructor?
  • What does it mean to declare a member function as virtual/static?
  • What is polymorphism?
  • What happens when you have a non-virtual method in a base class and a method of the same name in a derived class?
  • Can you call a virtual function in a base class when you have overridden it?
  • How could you determine if a linked list contains a cycle in it?
  • How would you reverse a doubly linked list?
  • How would you traverse a binary tree?

For probability, math, algorithms and puzzle questions with solutions, browse the CSE Blog archives.

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