Heard on the Street: Quantitative Questions from Wall Street Job Interviews

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The reason Jane Street has been able to seize such a big role in bond ETF trading is that it straddles the approach of high-speed, algorithm-powered trading firms like Virtu or Jump Trading and the human bond traders that still dominate Wall Street trading desks.

Nonetheless, the events of 2020 highlight just how big and influential the growing bond ETF universe is, and how vitally important firms like Jane Street are to their functioning. And that has some downsides.The revised 22nd edition contains 239 quantitative questions collected from actual job interviews in investment banking, investment management, and options trading. The interviewers use the same questions year-after-year, and here they are with detailed solutions! This edition also includes 264 non-quantitative actual interview questions, giving a total of more than 500 actual finance job interview questions. For an industry that often cultivates cinematic genesis stories, the opacity around Jane Street’s birth, ownership and even management is unusual. That extra confidence paid off handsomely when markets were thrown into a tailspin last March, and bond ETFs emerged as a major faultline. Some sceptics argue that only the Federal Reserve’s extraordinary stimulus prevented a disaster for fixed income ETFs, and remain convinced that they could still prove fragile. One way for American banks to offset the pressure coming from rising deposit costs would be to boost business: More loans, even if earning less individually, could still lead to overall revenue growth. He has previously written commentary on a wide range of companies for Heard on the Street, including airlines, real estate companies and luxury goods makers.

Banks of all sizes are more reluctant to lend, with overall loan growth lagging far behind the long-term average pace. Photo: Clarissa Bonet for The Wall Street Journal This document was uploaded by our user. The uploader already confirmed that they had the permission to publish If an ETF trades above the value of its assets, APs buy the underlying securities that match the ETF and use them to create new shares to sell to investors. When ETFs fall below the value of their assets, they instead redeem shares for a proportional slice of the underlying portfolio and then sell them. Mostly this continuous arbitrage doesn’t actually require the ETF itself to buy or sell anything and keeps it trading in line with its index.However, a fire sale by investors desperate to raise cash hit bond trading in March. That meant APs struggled to narrow the widening dislocations between the fast-sliding prices of bond ETFs and the lagging value of their assets, simply because they had trouble selling the underlying bonds.

This wasn’t an ETF liquidity story,” says Matt Berger, head of bond trading at Jane Street. “It was liquidity drying up in the underlying fixed income markets.” Questions that appeared in (or are likely to appear in) traditional corporate finance job interviews are indicated with a bank symbol in the margin (72 of the 242 quant questions and 196 of the 267 non-quant questions). This makes it easier for corporate finance candidates to go directly to the questions most relevant to them. Most of these questions also appeared in capital markets interviews and quant interviews. So, they should not be skipped over by capital markets or quant candidates unless they are obviously irrelevant. Equity ETFs are often supported by a plethora of market-makers and APs, but bond ETFs are more specialised, with a narrower club dominating activity. Some analysts and investors have long fretted what would happen if an accident were to befall one of the bigger players. “If you think the fixed income ETF market is systemically important, then Jane Street is systemically important,” says the one-time rival.The city of Montpelier is continuing to finalize the layout for FEMA’s temporary direct housing project to be placed on the city-owned Country Club Road property. This project is to provide housing to those who lost homes in the summer flooding event. City officials and FEMA contractors have settled on the boundaries, which are consistent with the outline shown to the City Council, according to the Oct. 13 city manager’s report. Additionally, the remainder of lease and infrastructure agreements are being completed. We think of ourselves as mainly built for crises,” says Rob Granieri, one of the company’s founders. Nonetheless, Mr Granieri insists there is little triumphalism at Jane Street. “I still walk in every day thinking that we’re still struggling to survive,” he admits. Jane Street traders in New York offices. The company’s forte is lubricating trading in exchange traded funds and other markets Liquidity warning