How Important Is Math and Mental Arithmetic

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Unless you work at a prop shop/market making firm, not important

suggest you go learn VBA right now...practice building spreadsheets that do something. move data around...use loops to implement some logic problem...build a word scanner and implement a diffusion index to characterize an FOMC statement or Philly Fed vs previous versions. These might not actually be useful, but you'll learn VBA skills that are useful

the competency you described is easily adequate. agree with the poster that said learn VBA and data manipulation. don't stress yourself out about the math. you're fine. get some experience with programming and database R, SQL etc

i'd recommend "The Secret of Mental Math"

there are few prop shops that are antiquated and ruthless for filtering based on mental math. beyond those few, even if you get some mental math qs wrong, it isn't a dealbreaker anymore if you have a compelling background and relevant skills. def helps if you nail their trick questions about stats, programming and markets - all of which are arguably far more relevant.

this may be surprising to some prop shops, but we don't trade in the pits anymore. knowing hand signals and being able to add up fractions quickly doesn't provide any advantage to a trader.

Thanks, everyone for the advice!

I have some programming experience as I was introduced to it in high school and understand programming logic I guess. I tried VBA, however, I could not find anything useful to do that I could not otherwise by using core excel. Any help in generating imaginative cases for which VBA will be an asset?

It is useful for manually hedging options trades.

There is no way to actually know whether someone is smart once you get the job, so people learn to flex as a means of displaying competence. A lot of flexes are weird flexes, but an accepted flex is useless displays of mental math ability. There then becomes a culture of uselessly displaying mental math ability, regardless of whether it improves investment performance. Interestingly, my own finding is that stocks do not tend to go up depending on your ability to calculate numbers in your head; that said, many seem to firmly believe this is the case.

As a result of this phenomenon, people start to believe mental math ability is somehow important as part of the job and so it is used as a filtering mechanism. It is stupid and useless, but it will not be removed from the culture of certain firms.

It's not that important but to calculate your positions in your head or to price something, yes, it's good to have. From my own personal experience, I would say algebra is probably more important because as a trader, it helps to figure out stuff from extrapolating or interpolating.