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

Product Information

The city of Montpelier is continuing to finalize the layout for FEMA’s temporary direct housing project to be placed on the city-owned Country Club Road property. This project is to provide housing to those who lost homes in the summer flooding event. City officials and FEMA contractors have settled on the boundaries, which are consistent with the outline shown to the City Council, according to the Oct. 13 city manager’s report. Additionally, the remainder of lease and infrastructure agreements are being completed. One way for American banks to offset the pressure coming from rising deposit costs would be to boost business: More loans, even if earning less individually, could still lead to overall revenue growth. That extra confidence paid off handsomely when markets were thrown into a tailspin last March, and bond ETFs emerged as a major faultline. Some sceptics argue that only the Federal Reserve’s extraordinary stimulus prevented a disaster for fixed income ETFs, and remain convinced that they could still prove fragile. 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 warning

This wasn’t an ETF liquidity story,” says Matt Berger, head of bond trading at Jane Street. “It was liquidity drying up in the underlying fixed income markets.”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. In practice, many bond ETFs traded almost like traditional closed-end funds, the Bank of Canada concluded in a postmortem published in December. 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 executives say they are well aware of the implications. “We know we are an important part of the efficiency of many of these markets, and that’s something that we feel a huge responsibility for and take very seriously,” Mr Berger says. He has previously written commentary on a wide range of companies for Heard on the Street, including airlines, real estate companies and luxury goods makers. The reason Jane Street has been able to seize such a big role in bond ETF trading is that it straddles the approach of high-speed, algorithm-powered trading firms like Virtu or Jump Trading and the human bond traders that still dominate Wall Street trading desks. 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 A year ago, the world seemed oblivious to signs that a novel virus outbreak in China was a serious, global threat. But one of Wall Street’s biggest but most secretive money machines saw the debacle coming and battened down the hatches.Spencer Jakab is global editor of Heard on the Street, The Wall Street Journal’s home for financial analysis and commentary. Jane Street is this big, important and growing player that no one’s really heard of,” says Steve Zamsky, previously head of corporate credit trading at Morgan Stanley and now a fund manager at Smith Capital. “They’re sophisticated, quirky and not typical of Wall Street traders.” It’s that time of year again: alternate-side winter parking regulations begin Nov. 15. The object is to have residents park in a way that allows the Department of Public Works to clear each side of the street from snow and slush during winter. The regulation calls for all cars to be parked on the correct side of the street from midnight to 5 p.m. as indicated by building numbers in relation to the calendar days. For example, odd-numbered calendar days call for parking on odd sides of the street and even-numbered calendar days call for parking on even numbered sides of the street. The transition period to move your vehicle is from 5 p.m. to 11:59 p.m. No parking is allowed downtown from 1 a.m. through 6:59 a.m. 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. Questions that appeared in (or are likely to appear in) traditional corporate finance job interviews are indicated with a bank symbol in the margin (72 of the 242 quant questions and 196 of the 267 non-quant questions). This makes it easier for corporate finance candidates to go directly to the questions most relevant to them. Most of these questions also appeared in capital markets interviews and quant interviews. So, they should not be skipped over by capital markets or quant candidates unless they are obviously irrelevant.