Desk-InterviewsMedium

3 min read · 459 words

A timed round, on the desk you are aiming at

Pick a desk or an asset class, answer out loud against a clock, and only then look at what a complete answer contains. It is the same set of questions printed on every desk and asset-class page — here they are dealt one at a time and timed, which is the version that tells you something.

Why out loud, and why timed

• Reading an answer and producing one are different skills, and only the second is tested in a room. The gap between them is invisible while you read — it only appears when somebody tries to speak.
• Ninety seconds is roughly what you get. Not because anybody publishes that number, but because an answer that runs past it has stopped being an answer and become a lecture.
• The parts are a shape, not a script. Somebody who can produce them in their own words can also answer the four variations that follow. Somebody who has memorised a paragraph can answer one.
• Missing a part is the useful outcome. Two or three of the four is the ordinary result the first time through, and the one you missed is the page to re-read.

What this is not

No question here is taken from anybody else's question bank, and none is a claim about what a named firm asks — that is neither verifiable from here nor ours to assert. They are this publication's own reading of which mechanism a question of that kind is testing. If a real interview asks something different, that is expected: what transfers is knowing which mechanism sits under a question, not having seen the question.

The rest of the preparation

• The markets product round — twenty-five open questions across the five families that page sets out, in the same timed shape.
• Explain it out loud — one instrument or one transaction, sixty seconds, four sentences. The shortest useful drill on this site.
• Test your knowledge — the other half of the job: whether the facts underneath a spoken answer are actually there.
• Mental arithmetic — the sums people do without a screen, and the rules of thumb behind them.
• Which desk trades what, and the role map if you are not yet sure which seat you are aiming at.