<p>Which majors do firms with Sales & Trading divisions normally look for? Is recruiting limited mainly to target schools like in I-Banking?</p>
<p>they look for the smartest people, and not just GPA smart, good personal skills and smooth talking like the ones ibd look for. I think they tend to be slightly more forgiving in terms of the GPA. I got interviews from a couple S&Ts but only one ibd. Obviously, mostly recruiting are done in target schools.</p>
<p>I think they tend to recruit math or engineering majors who have proven quant abilities. Majoring in finance wont give you much legs up because you basically learn everything during training. Also, as trading models and computers are getting more and more integrated, many of the more quant based divisions like computer science/engineering majors.</p>
<p>They look for ACTUAL intellectual power and quantitative ability, especially if you get remotely close to structured products. They grill you with really hard quantitative brainteasers, a lot harder than the ones you get from ibd interviews. These brainteasers a lot of times are more probability, or number theory based.</p>
<p>The hardest brain teasers I got from S&T:
1.
“John is standing outside a 100-story building holding two glass spheres. They are identical. You are told that both spheres, when dropped from the roof, would shatter upon hitting the earth. However, it would not necessarily break if dropped from the 1st story. Your task is to identify the lowest possible floor that you can drop a ball from and have it shatter.
What is the smallest number of drops you need to guarantee that you have identified the lowest story?”
2.
You have 25 horse, 5 race tracks. You cant time your hourses. How many times you have to race your horses before you find out the top 3.</p>
<p>btw, no paper, no calculator, just your brain. You have 1 minute. Go. (and meanwhile they try to give you a lot of pressure like stare at you and make noise to stimulate the “thinking fast under pressure” environment of S&T</p>
<p>I think the top market makers like Jane Street and DRW’s interviews are harder than the ones from BBs. Jane street has a brainteaser round, programming round, probability round, behaviorial round and wonderlic round.</p>
<p>what are the answers?</p>
<p>lol i was going to ask the same.</p>
<p>I would say the answer for the first question is 1 you have two balls and if you just drop one that shatters then thats it right? weird question though and definitely not logical</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Is the answer 1? If you drop it and it breaks, you can’t drop it again thus guaranteeing you identified the lowest story?</p></li>
<li><p>Is the answer 2? you have 5 horses on each track and then a race between the winners of them all and see the order in which the three horse win (you pick the first three)?</p></li>
</ol>
<p>yeah those are hard, i don’t think i’d do well in quant fields. lol i was doing my math homework and then these question just started bugging me again so i really have to know now.</p>
<p>it has a logical answer for no.1. a finite number that’s always the case.</p>
<p>the answer for the second one is definitely not 2.</p>
<p>Is the answer to the second one 11?</p>
<p>no. the answer to the no.2 is NOT 11, less than 11. Almost used up my time before I figured it out.
It’s much easier than no.1 btw. no.1 is just evil. didnt get the answer during interview, got it afterwards</p>
<p>Whats the answer to #1?</p>
<p>Would it be 14? I didn’t know you could throw both separately. If you could, you’d throw the first one and depending on if it breaks or not, test the second one? So you’d have to have a small gap between possible floors you can test. So starting from 100 you count the distance of 1 floor + 2 floors + 3 floors, etc, until you count up to the distance equaling or getting the first number past 100. That’s 14. So if you count going up that’s 14 +13 = 27, etc. until you get 95 + 4 is 99. You drop the fist ball from 99 and if it breaks you drop the second one from 95 to 98 (you start at 99 since it’s sure to drop from the roof??) I have no idea and I give up :-/ lol</p>
<p>Are you looking for simply the 3 fastest horses or the top 3 in order of speed?</p>
<p>1) The minimum for #1 is 18 drops. From the start, you should notice that a gap strategy is the most efficient (one where you drop the first sphere in regular steps, say every 10 floors, and once it breaks you fill in your knowledge with the first sphere).</p>
<p>You have 98 floors to test, but the integer math works out the same even if yo assume you have to test all 100 (because of rounding). You need to minimize the function 100/x + x - 2, where (100/x -1) = the maximum number of drops you will need from the first ball and (x-1) = the maximum number you’ll need from the second. x = 10 maximizes, so you need 9 drops of each ball. The first is dropped at floors 10,20,30…90 (since we already know the result at 100). Suppose it breaks at 30. Then we drop the second ball from 21,22…29.</p>
<p>2) The minimum for #2 is 7 races.</p>
<p>Race all 25 in waves of 5 to get a baseline.
Race the winners against each other. The winner’s winner is the top horse.
Take the horses that finished 2nd and 3rd behind the top horse in the qualifying wave, the horse that finished 2nd behind the 2nd place “winner” and the 3rd place “winner” and race them. Take the top two. These are horses #2 and #3.</p>
<p>This definitely works, so the answer is no more than 7. I don’t think there is a way to do it in fewer races.</p>
<p>the first one is not 18, it’s 14. I thought it’s 18 at first. but turned out to be 14. Method is close. Keep trying.</p>
<p>the second one is 7.</p>
<p>14, 27, 39, 50, 60, 69, 77, 84, 90, 95, 99</p>
<p>your intervals should be 14, 27, 39, 50, 60, 69, 77, 84, 90, 95, 99</p>
<p>1.if first egg broke at 14 (1 drop) you go from 1- 13 (13 drops) = 14 drops max</p>
<p>2.if first egg doesnt break at 14, go to 27, if first egg break there (2 drops so far), you go from 15-26 (12 drops) = 14 drops max.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>3 + 11</p></li>
<li><p>4+10</p></li>
<li><p>5 + 9</p></li>
<li><p>6 + 8</p></li>
</ol>
<p>and so on</p>
<p>and so on…
so it’s always 14 drops max</p>
<p>I am very interested in a trading career myself. Does age matter a lot? I am 24 years old and just entering college. I worked for my family business for a few years and did sales afterward. Now that I have a much clearer idea of what interests me (I am somewhat a late bloomer), will it be a major disadvantage if I apply for a trading job around the age of 27 when I am done with college?</p>
<p>My undergraduate will be in Computer Science most likely, as it is something I can easily excel at without a lot of effort. Are there any other majors that are benefical to the quantitative skills trading requires?</p>
<p>Additionally, I am going to be opening a simulated trading account and start trading to get some exposure to the market. </p>
<p>Any help and advice is appreciated.</p>
<p>If you are thinking about prop shops, Comp Sci is great. If you combine it with Math, I don’t think you could do a better double major.</p>
<p>Thank you giants. Do you know what kind of positions traders can move to after a few years? I am concerned about exit strategies.</p>
<p>A trader’s exit opps include trading and trading</p>