Heard on The Street: Quantitative Questions from Wall Street Job Interviews
Heard on The Street: Quantitative Questions from Wall Street Job Interviews
This is a must read! It is the first and the original book of quantitative questions from finance job interviews. Painstakingly revised over 15 years and 12 editions, Heard on The Street has been shaped by feedback from many hundreds of readers. With 50,000 copies in print (late 2009), its readership is unmatched by any competing book. The revised 12th edition contains over 175 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 over 125 non-quantitative actual interview questions, giving a total of more than 300 actual finance job interview questions. There is also a revised section on interview technique based on Dr. Crack’s experiences interviewing candidates and also based on feedback from interviewers worldwide. The quant questions cover pure quant/logic, financial economics, derivatives, and statistics. They come from all types of interviews (corporate finance, sales and trading, quant research, etc.), and from all levels of interviews (undergraduate, MS, MBA, PhD). The first seven editions of Heard on the Street contained an appendix on option pricing. That appendix was carved out as a standalone book in 2004, and it is now available in its revised second edition published April 2009: “Basic Black-Scholes” ISBN=0970055242. Dr. Crack has a PhD from MIT. He has won many teaching awards, and has publications in the top academic, practitioner, and teaching journals in finance. He has degrees/diplomas in Mathematics/Statistics, Finance, Financial Economics and Accounting/Finance. Dr. Crack taught at the university level for over 20 years including four years as a front line teaching assistant for MBA students at MIT. He has worked as an independent consultant to the New York Stock Exchange, and his most recent practitioner job was as the head of a quantitative active equity research team at what was the world’s largest institutional money manager.
User Ratings and Reviews
3 Stars This is NOT an i-banker interview book- for quants only
I’m in financial engineering so this book is reasonably useful if you are interviewing for a job as a quant, quantitative strategist or quantitative trader. However, this book purports (explicitly) to be an interview guide for “Investment Banking” jobs. I suppose that Timothy Falcon Crack doesn’t know what investment bankers do, but must i-bankers I know (and I know many) work at raising capital either through debt or equity or some hybrid. Only in the case of securitization jobs would an i-banker be expected to know much of these questions. Many of the questions relate purely to derivatives, which an i-banker who will be spending the next 5 years valuing companies on spreadsheets will not be expected to know at the level of the questioning. Other questions are so absurdly quantitative that there is no way anyone applying for a job in the capital markets division of an i-bank would mean that you would get such a question.
This book is useful for quants - but it is NOT for investment bankers.
5 Stars Just right
Bought this for my son, who was in the process of interviewing for an internship in investment banking. He got an offer from a prestigious Wall Street firm. Coincidence? Or was it this book? Either way, everybody here is very happy with my purchase!
5 Stars Essential preparation for finance interviews
This is a must for people heading to trading firms, banks, or other financial service firms for interviews. These firms typically scout for a few skill sets. One is general brainpower, as hard as that is to measure. Another is the more difficult math in finance, derivatives pricing. This book covers both in a quick and easy format to let you see where you stand. Moreover, if you can master the material in the book then you will be ready for the majority of an entry-level interview.
The derivatives questions cover “plain vanilla” options pricing and some basic understanding of the principles behind the formulas. Most firms want to see that you know the terms in the Black-Scholes equation and how options prices depend on things.
The earlier part of the book I find even more impressive. It’s a nearly comprehensive list of the brain-teasers you get in this process. That’s where the employer is trying to measure general brainpower. Of course, a brain-teaser you haven’t seen before will give you pause and maybe elude you in the stress of an interview. But after reading this book the answers could be at the ready. The set of brain-teasers through history is actually very small. That is after distilling all the variations on them such as whether you are weighing coins or cannonballs and such. And that set of puzzles, questions designed to test basic reasoning and logic, without depending on formal math, is well covered in this book. In fact, in many interviews I have only encountered one single brain-teaser that is not in this book (and it’s not a very good one either).
Finally Mr. Crack inserts notes on the culture of banks which might scare or excite the prospective employee. This book is both good orientation and preparation for starting a career in finance.
It is still relevant and helpful ten years later. That said, there is one area this book totally misses (because of what’s happened in the past ten years). That is programming questions. Especially in the past couple of years most interviews will look for some software development skill on top of the general brainpower and command of financial derivatives. Tests on C++ or OOP are common these days. For that material you have to look elsewhere.
5 Stars Fun and Useful
I bought this book for fun. I like brain teasers and since this includes finance problems it is fun and keeps me sharp. For interview preparation it is good, since it doesn’t only include quantitative questions but also includes economics and logic and general interview questions. I think that this type of preparation would be useful to most people. So if you have an interview it is worthwhile reading this book. Also, if you are interviewing people and want questions in another field to see how well rounded a candidate is, then this would be a useful reference.
4 Stars Worth it..
The Heard on the street book is worth the price. However, this is becoming a fairly common book. Use it to start learning how to approach the problems…Dont it be the sole book for your preparation.. I was fairly surprised, to see all my friends had it..So definitely the interviewers would have covered this ground even earlier…
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