C++ Programming for Financial Engineering
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Python for Finance with Intro to Data Science
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An Intuition-Based Options Primer for FE
Ideal for entry level positions interviews and graduate studies, specializing in options trading arbitrage and options valuation models. Learn more Join!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CrossGamma" data-source="post: 295607" data-attributes="member: 43839">You probably applied at IMC as an option trader as opposed to a quantitative researcher. This process for this role (and to a lesser degree even the quantitative researcher role) is indeed not about finding “the smartest scientists”. While the systems of companies like IMC and Optiver are highly automated, the trader roles still involve a decent amount of operations and human decision making. In particular these types of tests are trying to assess your ability to make quick decisions under uncertainty, adapt to changing situations, ability to memorize large amounts of information as it is presented to you, mental maths, statistical intuition, … Optiver for example is famous for having a fairly hard mental maths test as one of their first early round filters. Later rounds would focus on assessing your maths and probability skills through some puzzles and trading games. Even there a focus would still be on speed, intuition and pragmatism - e.g. are you able to make reasonable estimates when appropriate instead of formally working through a difficult problem.And yes - being the best mathematician does not necessarily (I would even say typically not) translate into being the best trader. In trading it is often not about finding the best or theoretically neatest solution to a problem but finding something that gets you 90% there and you monetize on it while the opportunity exists. Many theoreticians can find this unsatisfactory.I see “finite difference methods” and “C++” mentioned here a lot as core skills for quants. While this is maybe still true for quants working on pricing libraries, the vast majority of buy side quants even at options trading firms will not work on the options pricer itself but focus more on market making algorithms, signal analysis, predictions, … While the production implementation is often in C++ and written by developers, prototyping is typically done in Python.</blockquote>

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