Quant Job Interview Questions and Answers by Mark Joshi

In a highly competitive market at entry level his timing for releasing the book could not be better. As a headhunter, I am of course a student of the questions asked by banks to try and work out who has ability beyond exam results. This of course means that many people study brainteasers in just the same way as they do any other subject.

The obvious comparison is with the Crack books which sell in impressive numbers. Your intuition is probably that given the age and wide availability of this small subset of possible questions, that their success undermines themselves, and that the one question you know you won't get is in Crack. Wrong. Talking to people after interviews, it is clear that some are asked simple variations on classical Crack questions, and some are asked [i]exactly[/i] what is explained in the book. The danger of course is where you think you have been asked the well-known question, or a slight variant which means you look like a parrot that forgot his lines. To help deal with this, there are follow on questions suggested for you to think about, so that you are not too tightly focused on the exact ones asked.

Thus merely by enabling you to think through questions outside the time worn Crack set, Joshi's book justifies the price both in cash, and more importantly the number of hours it will consume to make sure you do this stuff right. Give there are >225 main questions that can work out as one to two weeks of your life, and of course, I have to tell you that the longer you take to work through it the more time you should work on this stuff to get the job you want.

The first critical issue is the correlation between the contents and what you might expect to see in real life. Certainly on the Brainteaser side, it is excellent, and that is the clear focus of the book. It could be longer on "algorithmic" brainteasers, the type covered by recursion, divide and conquer et al, and of course it is relatively generic across markets, meaning that you need to do some work on making sure that if the question is put in terms of the market you want to work in, that you can do the translation. In that way it is almost entirely disjoint from Wilmott's FAQ book, which will help you start on that equally important part of your interview process.

The C++ questions although "real" are not as vicious as many asked at interview.

The explanations are clear, and I did not find any ghastly errors, though I will confess that I did not check enough to be sure that it is defect free.

Given this review you can expect to see it in the new recommended reading list for our Quant Career Guide.