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

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Spencer Jakab is global editor of Heard on the Street, The Wall Street Journal’s home for financial analysis and commentary.

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. 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 warningThe 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.

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. Advance Auto Parts stomped on the gas pedal and, instead of accelerating, flooded the engine. Since former PepsiCo executive Tom Greco took over in April 2016, and especially the past few years, the retailer has been notable for struggling in a hot retail category. Its shares have lagged behind rivals O’Reilly Automotive and AutoZone by 300 and 270 percentage points, respectively, and have shed more than half of their value during his tenure.

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These results suggest that market liquidity conditions were resilient in the fixed income ETF market throughout the crisis. Moreover, the results suggest that fixed income ETF prices continued to provide a real-time view of the value of the underlying bonds during the crisis,” BoC said. “In contrast, the net asset value of fixed income ETFs with less liquid holdings provided only a lagged indication of their ‘true’ value due to poor bond trading activity.” Fed thumbs-up

Stephen Wilmot is an editor of The Wall Street Journal's Heard on the Street column, based in London. In addition to editing, he writes columns about car makers, often focused on the impact of electric vehicles on automotive strategy and on the case for investing in companies like General Motors, Tesla and Volkswagen. Jane Street’s unorthodoxy goes well beyond its programming language. Mr Granieri is the only remaining founder still at the company, but there is no chief executive, hierarchy or even a clear management committee. Instead, Jane Street almost resembles an anarchist commune, informally led by a group of 30 or 40 senior executives. A smattering of titles have been reluctantly adopted in recent years, but internally they are little used and people rotate around the firm to keep things fresh. Few leave. Our basic service, standing ready to buy and sell ETFs, options and bonds, is even more critical in times of stress,” says Josh Kulkin, one of its top traders. “Because we bought all that extra protection we didn’t have to worry about the extreme moves, and were prepared to provide liquidity in an outsized way.”What now for Wall Street’s least-known trading tycoons? Jane Street made a move into trading directly with investment groups in 2014 — territory historically dominated by big banks. It is now expanding its business in Asia and planning to push more aggressively into equity market options.