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

by Timothy Falcon Crack

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.

Genres: Finance, Economics, Business, Mathematics, Technology, Nonfiction

258 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2000

Reviews

[gekko100 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hate what this books represents: a "how-to" manual to game the interview system of Wall St companies. But it does what it says on the tin, and well: although it was written years before my interviews, I still encountered several of the questions.

[Derek Ho · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good practice in getting my critical thinking skills ready and helped me land a nice front-office job! Useful tips on what interviewers think are dropped throughout, which I can testify are true based on my job search experience during the past few months. Will probably reference it again every so often.

[Zhang Chenxi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I rather liked the statistics section: it was interesting questions about game theory styled payoffs, standard but not too tough.

[Austin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here's a rarity (particularly for finance books): a book that delivers exactly what it claims to deliver. While Heard on the Street is no substitute for more textbook-like offerings when it comes to learning the field, it does give an excellent idea of what a person applying for a job on Wall Street needs to be prepared to answer (cooly and efficiently) in the actual interview. The probability problems and brain teasers cover all of the most frequently recurring themes in their respective categories, and the questions related to equity options are accompanied by excellent explanations that emphasize intuition and understanding of the subtleties of questions designed to trip you up. Very, very useful.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book does what it says--gives many good problems which double as interview questions and gives solutions. It helps to prepare the reader well for the 'quant' interviews since so many problems are canned or just similar to those given in the book. Worth it.

[Shanta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantastic introduction to quant job interviews.

[Alex Trimm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hours of fun

[Jeremy Lo · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of questions in this book actually come up in quant interviews. Very useful indeed. The solutions can sometimes be a bit confusing and wordy.