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You're hosting a party, and you have 1000 bottles of wine. 24 hours before, you realize that exactly one bottle is poisoned. You have 10 test rats, each of which can taste any number of the bottles of wine before the party; a rat will die before the party if and only if it tastes a poisoned bottle. How will you use the test rats to identify as many non-poisoned bottles to retain for consumption at the party? (e.g. have one rat taste one bottle. If it doesn't die, you've saved one bottle for the party. This is not the best strategy, by the way)
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Trader Intern

Interviewed at Old Mission

4.2★
Jan 2, 2014

You're hosting a party, and you have 1000 bottles of wine. 24 hours before, you realize that exactly one bottle is poisoned. You have 10 test rats, each of which can taste any number of the bottles of wine before the party; a rat will die before the party if and only if it tastes a poisoned bottle. How will you use the test rats to identify as many non-poisoned bottles to retain for consumption at the party? (e.g. have one rat taste one bottle. If it doesn't die, you've saved one bottle for the party. This is not the best strategy, by the way)

Q. 7x7 matrix which is symmetric, each column has numbers 1 to 7. Prob that diagonal has all numbers from 1 to 7? Q. Game of Nim. you can pick any number of rocks from 1 to 6, describe your winnning strategy Q. You have to go from 0,0 to 8,8 using E and N. number of ways to do so in which direction changes are even.
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Quant Trader Analyst

Interviewed at Graviton Research Capital

4.1★
Nov 20, 2021

Q. 7x7 matrix which is symmetric, each column has numbers 1 to 7. Prob that diagonal has all numbers from 1 to 7? Q. Game of Nim. you can pick any number of rocks from 1 to 6, describe your winnning strategy Q. You have to go from 0,0 to 8,8 using E and N. number of ways to do so in which direction changes are even.

HR: Motivation for trading (especially important if you dont come from a finance background), Why Da Vinci specifically. Tell me about yourself, tell me about a time when blah blah happened or something standard like that. Know your CV. Where do you see yourself, what do you know about the industry / where its going, what do you think about markets, good / bad thing? why? Technical: Brain teaser questions. For example 10 football teams playing in a group stage, top 4 go through. A bunch of questions about qualification possibilities (combinatorics). Expected value questions, you have a set amount of money, how much would you bet on this type of game, by calculating its expected value. Game is based on 4 cards, 2 red 2 black, depending on the card you either double your money or get nothing with some additional twists thrown in. Expected value and path dependency style questions. Market making: Give me a market (bid-ask) on the population of "insert place you know nothing about" 10% wide.
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Graduate Trader

Interviewed at Da Vinci Derivatives

4.5★
Aug 14, 2021

HR: Motivation for trading (especially important if you dont come from a finance background), Why Da Vinci specifically. Tell me about yourself, tell me about a time when blah blah happened or something standard like that. Know your CV. Where do you see yourself, what do you know about the industry / where its going, what do you think about markets, good / bad thing? why? Technical: Brain teaser questions. For example 10 football teams playing in a group stage, top 4 go through. A bunch of questions about qualification possibilities (combinatorics). Expected value questions, you have a set amount of money, how much would you bet on this type of game, by calculating its expected value. Game is based on 4 cards, 2 red 2 black, depending on the card you either double your money or get nothing with some additional twists thrown in. Expected value and path dependency style questions. Market making: Give me a market (bid-ask) on the population of "insert place you know nothing about" 10% wide.

Making a market on the Chase Corporate Challenge was difficult. I had absolutely no clue how many people participated so I had to make a very wide market (but was still wrong on a confidence interval which I said was 70% confidence). He asked my 100% confidence interval (which included the correct answer) after he could tell my first answer wasn't confident enough.
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Campus: Trader Internship

Interviewed at Optiver

3.7★
Feb 6, 2014

Making a market on the Chase Corporate Challenge was difficult. I had absolutely no clue how many people participated so I had to make a very wide market (but was still wrong on a confidence interval which I said was 70% confidence). He asked my 100% confidence interval (which included the correct answer) after he could tell my first answer wasn't confident enough.

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