I have a friend who was there this summer that said he really enjoyed it and was impressed with the firm. Said the culture was really chill and it seemed like he was getting pretty solid money. Definitely one of the more reputable Chicago prop shops, probably much closer to a Citadel/drw/Optiver than say a belvedere/Akuna type shop.

 
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Akuna is very similar to Optiver though. The founders of Akuna were all partners at Optiver. Unless you mean Citadel/DRW/Optiver are more well known - which I agree with. However, with prop trading I don't think name matters much.

One thing I noticed is IMC had ~90 million in distributable fixed + variable bonuses in 2016, compared to Optiver's 320 million. IMC has about 1/2 to 2/3 of the employees, but the profit/employee is still significantly lower.

 

Not sure what you mean by HFT vs low latency...Those two are the same.

Compensation-wise I will say mean of Optiver would be higher than IMC, but nothing significant. I mean, you shouldn't make your choice for 100k difference when your fit with your desk, co-workers, and company would make few million difference, right?

 

You can't prepare for it. It's not like mental math tests from other firms where you can grind tradertest or zetamac to improve. It's purely a logic and reasoning test with a factor of speed. Not very hard at all to pass but apparently a lot of people fail it.

 

I gave it last year with no practice. I'm no Maths whiz or something but it was very simple. May have got 1 answer wrong. Their third section is tricky especially the last question of both sections.

Though I got kicked in the next HR round because I had never given such interviews before :D.

"The markets are always changing , and they are always the same."
 

Solid firm. Any of those four are comparable, I would go with the one that feels right. All offer solid comp and exit opps (if you want to switch from one to one of the others later down the road, that's very doable).

 

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