Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This book is specifically targeted at those applying for highly-quantitative jobs on Wall Street, and any job seeker in that area would be nuts not to take advantage of the inside information Professor Crack reveals.

The reason I am writing this review, though, is that I believe the sample interview questions and advice are invaluable to anyone interviewing for any job that involves a lot of analysis.

I am not in the finance field, but rather in technology consulting. Having practiced with Heard on the Street, I found the "tough" interview questions I encountered to be downright easy, and I breezed through several rounds of interviews, landing the job I wanted at a major computer company best known by its three-letter acronym.

If you're headed to Wall Street, reading this book is a no-brainer. If you're headed anywhere else that involves numbers, logic or analysis of a non-financial nature, you'll still be glad you read it.

I'm a financial engineering student at an Ivy League institution. Just got the book from Amazon. Awesome book, so far the best help in preparing for technical aspect of the ib (quantitative positions) interviews that I have encountered. I thought it would be sort of a black and white xerox copy - instead it turned out to be really well published. The book is rather weighty (>300p), contains a plethora of questions with detailed explanations, 0 filler. The guy is very good about cultivating the attitude of, "It's the thinking process and not the number in the answer." Overall, I would definitely recommed this. Given the amount of general info you can garner off free advice sites - vault/wetfeet, this may as well be the number one book on your preparation list.

This book was critical in helping me get an internship in trading with a high-profile hedge fund this summer. Throughout the interviewing process, over 50% of the technical questions that I received were discussed in this book.

While the book is geared towards more technical positions and does involve a fair amount of math, I would still recommend it even if you are looking for a non-technical position with a hedge fund or an i-bank, since this book contains a lot of brain teasers and logical questions that are commonly asked in all finance interviews to test how well you can think on your feet and under time pressure.

Bottom line: Very comprehensive, very rigorous, the best I have see for hard-core finance jobs. This book is definitely heads and sholders above all of the Vault guides.

6 stars, because it's helpful too. A really fun read, for me it was like a book of crosswords. This book is best suited for MBA's interviewing for top jobs, or undergrads interested in seeing what's expected of them after they get an MBA.

An amazing book. I have been on quite a few interviews and
this book has helped me tremendously. Sometimes the questions I had on the interviews were EXACTLY the same or variations of questions discussed in the book. Also, the equity derivatives section is of tremendous value in that it gives a perspective on equity derivatives not talked in the many derivatives books out there. I hightly recommend the book.

This is a must for people heading to trading firms, banks, or other financial service firms for interviews. These firms typically scout for a few skill sets. One is general brainpower, as hard as that is to measure. Another is the more difficult math in finance, derivatives pricing. This book covers both in a quick and easy format to let you see where you stand. Moreover, if you can master the material in the book then you will be ready for the majority of an entry-level interview.

The derivatives questions cover "plain vanilla" options pricing and some basic understanding of the principles behind the formulas. Most firms want to see that you know the terms in the Black-Scholes equation and how options prices depend on things.

The earlier part of the book I find even more impressive. It's a nearly comprehensive list of the brain-teasers you get in this process. That's where the employer is trying to measure general brainpower. Of course, a brain-teaser you haven't seen before will give you pause and maybe elude you in the stress of an interview. But after reading this book the answers could be at the ready. The set of brain-teasers through history is actually very small. That is after distilling all the variations on them such as whether you are weighing coins or cannonballs and such. And that set of puzzles, questions designed to test basic reasoning and logic, without depending on formal math, is well covered in this book. In fact, in many interviews I have only encountered one single brain-teaser that is not in this book (and it's not a very good one either).

Finally Mr. Crack inserts notes on the culture of banks which might scare or excite the prospective employee. This book is both good orientation and preparation for starting a career in finance.

It is still relevant and helpful ten years later. That said, there is one area this book totally misses (because of what's happened in the past ten years). That is programming questions. Especially in the past couple of years most interviews will look for some software development skill on top of the general brainpower and command of financial derivatives. Tests on C++ or OOP are common these days. For that material you have to look elsewhere.

Bought this for my son, who was in the process of interviewing for an internship in investment banking. He got an offer from a prestigious Wall Street firm. Coincidence? Or was it this book? Either way, everybody here is very happy with my purchase!

This is a great book preparing for an interview, with lots of logic puzzles, stat. and derivatives questions, solid interview advice and some funny stories. The logic questions range from fairly straightforward and simple to more advanced, and I think most people will at least find a couple of them challenging.

Great fun!

This is a decent book. I only looked at a couple of chapters on analytical and statistics problems. Some of the problems marked "hard" were quite interesting and challenging. Quite a few of the problems were trivial and repetitive though. The solutions are generally well written, though sometimes a bit too verbose (for my taste).

Overall, not a bad investment if you are preparing for job interviews which may expect you to crack a few puzzles.

I got a masters degree in financial engineering, I definitely learnt a lot there but it was not enough to tackle wall street job interviews. I practiced on "Heard On The Street" and this book has been of tremendous help. Many of the questions that I have been asked were in this book. And it also helped me to answer other questions that were not in the book - the reason is because you will be fluent with the mechanics that you need to answer interview questions. I am recommending it to everyone looking for a quantitatively (slightly or strongly) oriented job in wall street. It definitely helped me to get some offers this year.