Prep

Every other section of this site is organised the way the subject is — by instrument, by mechanism, by document. This one is organised the way a deadline is. You have an interview on Thursday, you start on a desk in three weeks, or you have just moved into a seat next to one and everybody around you is using words nobody is going to explain. The material was already here; these six pages are the doors into it. All of it is information and education only — see the disclaimer. Nothing here is careers advice, and nothing anywhere on this site is investment advice.

The badges say how much a page assumes: Easy everyday words, nothing to look up · Medium one idea you may need to look up first · Hard written for people who work in the market.

Before the interview

• The product round of a markets interviewMediumfive families of product question, what a complete answer to each contains, how to talk about a trade honestly, the five ordinary ways a prepared candidate still loses the round, and a two-week route through this site.
• Explain it out loudEasya four-sentence template that fits every instrument here, twelve products written out in it, and a drill for finding the one sentence you cannot yet say.
• Markets arithmetic without a screenMediumtwelve approximations, each derived rather than asserted and each checked against the exact answer, so you know where it breaks.

Before the first day

• Which desk trades whatMediumeleven trading seats and six that sit next to them: what each touches, the single number it lives by, and what a bad day looks like from that chair.
• The words of your first weekEasythe vocabulary a floor uses without explaining it, grouped by the situation you first hear each word in rather than by alphabet.

If you are not the one trading

Almost every explanation of finance is written for the person putting the position on, and that is a minority of the people who have to understand it. Each of these is a route through the same material for a seat that is usually left to translate it themselves. None of them adds subject matter — they are orders through what is already here, arranged by what that seat is accountable for.

• If you are not the one tradingEasyrisk, operations, compliance, audit, product control, technology, treasury. What can go wrong, who owes what, what has to happen after the trade, and where the money leaks — in that order, because that is the order your seat asks in.
• If the bank is quoting youEasyfor a treasurer, a finance director or an IR team. What the desk opposite you is doing, the three questions worth asking about any quote, and where the margin sits on each kind of transaction.
• If you have to get it right in writingEasyjournalists, lawyers, auditors, supervisors, lecturers. A four-minute checking route, and the four errors of mechanism that survive every edit.
• If you are building the systemMediumengineers, data and product people. What a trade is as data, the lifecycle nobody documents, corporate actions as the case that costs a year, and why reconciliation exists at all. The domain is the hard part, and it is written for people who trade rather than for people who have to represent it.
• If you are on the boardEasynon-executives, trustees and audit committee members. You cannot verify the number and you are responsible for it: four questions that work on any paper, and the reading that makes them answerable.
• If you are coming from another industryEasya map rather than a syllabus. The three divisions nobody states out loud, the four misconceptions that cost the most time, and what actually transfers from software, law, science, audit or any operational job.
• If you are teaching thisEasyfor lecturers and course leaders. A twelve-week outline built entirely from pages that already exist, four kinds of assessment that work without any student handing anything over, and a straight answer about what may be reused.

If you are not sure which seat you want

• Which role needs which part of this siteEasytwelve jobs that have to understand financial products without necessarily trading them: risk, quant, operations, compliance, asset management, treasury, journalism, law, supervision, teaching, and the person who simply holds something and wants to know what it is.

Two things to practise rather than read

Reading a rule and producing it under a clock are different skills, and only the second one is ever asked for. Both of these are on the pages above; both generate a fresh round every time, and neither draws on anybody else's question bank.

• The arithmetic drill — eight questions, fifteen seconds each, generated from the twelve rules of thumb. Basis points on a notional, duration, DV01, the at-the-money option, volatility across time, cross rates, drawdown recovery, fee drag. An answer within a few percent counts, because these are approximations.
• The four-sentence drill — one instrument at random out of 129, sixty seconds, out loud, then the four things a complete answer contains. Nothing is graded: whether four spoken sentences were complete is not something a checklist can decide. Making the gap visible is the whole exercise.

What to reach for after these

• The learning paths — ten routes through the atlas, each ordered so that no page assumes anything that has not already appeared. Path 1 is the ten instruments everything else references.
• The atlas itself — 129 instruments across 11 markets, each opening with the ones that define its market.
• The market examMedium — 15 random questions across the whole site. The fastest way to find the page you actually needed is to get its question wrong.
• How products failEasy — six patterns that between them cover every case study here, and the single most reusable thing on the site in an interview.

One thing worth saying plainly

None of these pages quotes an interviewer, describes an employer's process, or claims to know what any particular firm asks. They are this publication's own reading of what a product question is for, written so that they are useful whether you are preparing for an interview, teaching the material, or simply checking whether you understand an instrument well enough to say so out loud. Everything on this site is written for it — see the licences and credits.