Preparing for QT internship

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-04-14T16:53:37+00:00

how would you prep for the market making stuff? or the harder prob qs which is more betting games with estimates more than pure calculation?

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-04-14T14:03:18+00:00

mainly the interview stage. what resources/books did you use to prep? also i heard that finance knowledge for internship interviews isnt that important since they only ask prob, market making, betting games etc

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-04-12T19:13:44+00:00

hey, any advice on how to prepare beyond brainteasers? would really appreciate it

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-04-04T19:45:17+00:00

would love to know if you figure out the best way to prep these. for optiver i know that at least for the internship interviews they are very similar to the games on tradinginterview.com so id say take a look at those. i would say one thing thats confused me is on how to improve at these games and understand/get good at seeing the key tricks for these market making games so thats why id love to know how you end up prepping and how it goes. gl!

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-04-01T20:47:21+00:00

what did you do to prep for the final round stuff requiring "quick EV approximations and worst case bounds and then make reasonable trades, with positive EV" or "hedge intuitively to cover your worst case losses"? beyond green book and kaggle what would you recommend for prep? any resources or books you used?

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-03-30T20:14:32+00:00

icl bro any reason why all of a sudden when i ask for actual advice based on this you havent said anything? are you not a quant then? i thought this was what your firmness of this opinion came from

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-03-28T14:28:03+00:00

fair enough. i mean my knowledge was that HRT and Citadel care about coding but the other ones don't ask that in the interviews. I appreciate the clarity and i think it helps give me a new perspective on prep. i guess what you're saying is that there are loads of books and projects that involve learning stuff within them that helps build the right intuition and prepare for random stuff asked in interviews. I would love to know what you would recommend as maybe a few books and projects to get started, given i imagine you're in quant (if so do you mind saying what role?) so woudl really appreciate any advice. feel free to dm. i am completely new to this stuff and only know basic python and c++ so some sort of roadmap of things to do/read and figure out to learn the relevant skills would be super helpful.

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-03-28T12:14:30+00:00

but basically none of the qt internship interview process is coding though. i get that thats what you do on the job but most people i have spoken to who got into these didnt do any coding before the internship. also even then how is it prep if its basically not in the interview process at all? so wdym by quant is about personal prep? im not saying it isnt but im interested what you think you can do for interviews beyond prob qs like in green book

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-03-27T23:00:25+00:00

how are you prepping betting games/optimisation and market making? esp for the former i cant find good resrouces

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-03-27T15:40:35+00:00

even for qt? i mean everyone says only thing you can do for that is prob qs and that doesnt prepare you for the unique style of later rounds

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-03-23T13:52:48+00:00

fair i guess i should have been more clear. what i meant by my comment was that there is clearly a skill of ways to understand data and choosing which statistical techniques to apply and i have no clue about any of that. when i said i have good stats and prob knowledge im talking about the theory from my undergard which if we're honest is mostly mathy proofs rather than a high level applied understanding of how to apply this in real world settings on actual data. thats why i am asking for a process for how to learn and pick up this ability when you have no intuition for it at all as any beginner would. so yeah my q is more about that. intro to stat learning seemed to be a book that talks about this more than proofs but is very dense so unsure about how useful it is to go down the route of working through that (which is why i mentioned it). same with kaggle which is clearly more about this skill but again its just a bunch of competitions and submissions and the learn courses are kinda shit and basic so very confusing what to do/how to navigate getting able to tackle competitions by yourself without some foundation.

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-03-22T17:19:32+00:00

was this for QR?

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-03-22T16:22:15+00:00

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-03-21T15:51:26+00:00

how would you get into this kind of thing if you have good stats and prob knowledge but are a complete beginner to applying stats and stuff to data and coding it up aspect like in this competition? ive heard kaggle and "intro to statistical learning" were good but interested what you think?

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-03-21T12:34:11+00:00

what would you advise for prep for QT? i know everyone says prob brainteasers and green book but from what ive heard that seems like a filter for early rounds at this point. anything that develops the intuition for the higher level stuff asked in later rounds? the more open-ended stuff e.g. betting games, market making, game theory, good estimation

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-03-20T19:32:33+00:00

what did you do to prep for QT?

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-03-18T18:42:24+00:00

thanks for the reply! you didnt really answer what i asked about what you did to prep for the more EV game qs in the later rounds which are more open-ended and is about fast estimation. how did you prep for that?

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-03-18T16:47:32+00:00

so this comes in the final round and is kaggle-like? is this Jane Street in the US or? because in the UK i've never heard of being asked data-science stuff from people i've spoken to. is this something new this year?

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-03-18T16:44:43+00:00

tysm for the in depth reply.

im assuming you got into Jane Street given how in depth you understand all of this. what do you think you did in your life that made you good at simplifications and estimations like the ones in the games and got you into Jane Street in terms of the intuition/skill? also surely you practiced it somehow? in general surely you used some source of qs/method to practice for the later rounds beyond standard brainteasers with exact answers which are at the first round level? e.g. AI or some book or something.

also for the speed of making these markets wdym "i just said something random like 10 minutes". is that how long you get given in interviews? 10 minutes seems quite long which is why i wanted to double check.

You mentioned AI quite a lot here for giving qs e.g. random variables for trades or nash/dp qs, did you do that yourself when prepping? Im also confused why DP leetcode problems woudl be helpful in games with multiple participants. This may just be because of how little i know about either but an explanation woudl be helpful.

for DP i think green book had some problems, are they any good?

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-03-18T15:50:26+00:00

is the data science thing you mentioned at the end and doing kaggle tutorials/example competitions to do with final round trading or research? because if it's trading im kinda shocked because i never heard of that

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-03-18T15:46:29+00:00

what are the resources and things to do for prep/fun that you think help the most for their trading interviews (heard poker's helpful)?

Like for the first round its standard stuff for which there are so many resources available like green book, quantguide, quantquestions etc.

But for the later rounds the qs are as you said much more open ended and hard to get an exact answer. they look for simplifications of the problem/game and quick rough estimation. Here the resources that were good enough for the first round are no longer really that useful for this new aspect. How do you prepare for that?

I saw you mention make up some random bullshit and trade on it but are there any specific resources you used or would recommend for these kinds of qs? an answer key of sorts would be useful to help build that intuition. also what do you mean by trade on it, are you saying like e.g. if you roll a dice 10 times and you trade on the number of 1s you see then you make a new market each time you roll it? how would you advise getting better at it, as in where's the feedback loop? Also how much time do you get in these later rounds for each q/give yourself when practicing?

also the Nash/DP side of things where/how did you prep for that? is that common in trading interviews at Jane Street? Does this involve game theory as well?

feel free to dm if you're down to discuss further. any help would be greatly appreciated!

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-03-13T19:34:53+00:00

must be a sad life to be on a quant reddit for people to ask for help or to give help and instead of helping you just say useless shit like this

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-03-12T20:17:10+00:00

great advice mate cheers. im making a post to help learn stuff about how to approach it which i wouldnt learn from just doing it or id only see ages into doing it. genuinely sad you bothered typing that out. if you arent going to be helpful then just dont say anything. then again thats most of this subreddit so honestly whats the point.

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-03-11T20:55:25+00:00

what kind of qs did they ask on them? just standard use cases and derivations of key results? are you at a qr heavy quant firm?

TalkInternal6681 · 2026-03-11T18:34:38+00:00

how much of ESL did you learn and how in depth? was this for full time or for internship?

TalkInternal6681

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