Hardest technical questions you got in HF interviews?
What are some the technical questions you get asked in HF interviews? (L/S fundamental equity analyst). Are they really just like banking technicals or different? If you were applying for industrials sector, what would you make sure you knew before going into the interview?
bumping
Maybe pitching them an investment idea they’ll actually invest in
Yea fair enough - PMs/Analysts - how often will you hire someone if the pitch isn't fantastic but thinking/process seem pretty good?
For experienced hires, very rare
For entry level, happens quite commonly
I've found most places try to brainrape you
What’s an asset with zero beta?
Reply for answer if you don’t get it
treasuries? Also doesn't seem super relevant for equity L/S but shows what i know!
Think treasuries are supposed to have negative beta since they're a risk off asset. Is cash 0 beta?
A dollar bill
hahahah my L/S book
Gold, Art and Patek Philippe ?
A zero beta asset should have a cost of capital equal to the risk free rate. Therefore, a 10-year treasury should theoretically qualify.
What price would you pay for a 10% 10 year bond for a 0% IRR is not necessarily a hard question but a very interesting way to quickly determine if people understand discounted cash flow concepts.
If the face value is $1, paying $2 would be a 0% irr, right?
Yes. Pv(cf) is the sum of all cf. which is $100+ 10* 10 = 200. So you pay 200 vs par.
This was for positions that I believe are different than what you are looking at (generally something like quant researcher positions), but at a few prop funds I was asked (among other questions)
- to give an efficient algorithm for finding if a point in 2d was on the interior of a polygon (with vertices given in order as a list)
- to calculate the probability of return to 0 of a particular asymmetric random walk
- to write a very dumbed-down regular expression matcher
- to give the optimal strategy for a Nim variant (with a small number of piles, and restrictions on the number of objects you could remove).
- to give an algorithm to efficiently calculate the median of a large set of numbers stored in a distributed fashion
Most of these problems were also phrased in a less direct way (and had to be reduced to what I gave above). I found them relatively challenging (but also quite fun!)
edit. Remembered a few more!
- the equivalent resistance across a wire cube (with leads on opposite corners) and a 1ohm resistor on each edge (I'm not a physicist... or an engineer, nor was the position related to that)
- an algorithm for efficiently generating a standard gaussian random variable from scratch
these are for quant roles but interesting indeed.
definitely different from prop shops traders math problem. Are they more like PHD hire questions? interviewed with so many props until final rounds and few quant hfs but never heard of them except probability of return
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