Proprietary trading
Five Rings interview guide
Reported to set demanding probability and maths puzzles, with mental maths and games in the trading process.
TraderSoftware engineer
How the process usually runs
- 1
Screening
Probability and maths puzzles that reward a clean method over a long calculation.
Practise: Probability lessons
- 2
Interviews
Harder probability, combinatorics and games, asked aloud.
Practise: Games and decision theory
- 3
What to revise
Weighted most heavily in reports: probability puzzles, combinatorics, games. The topics below are where the 16 questions in the bank reported at Five Rings come from.
Questions reported at Five Rings
- You allocate 10 identical lots across 4 accounts, and an account may receive none.Free solution
- You roll a fair die and may re-roll once, keeping the second value if you do.Free solution
- What is C(10, 0)+C(10, 2)+C(10, 4)+C(10, 6)+C(10, 8)+C(10, 10)?Foundation
- How many five-digit numbers have strictly increasing digits from left to right…Applied
- Seven distinct balls go into three distinct boxes, and no box may be left empty.Advanced
- A four-bead necklace uses beads of two colours, and two necklaces count as the…Expert
- Which of these identities requires the variables to be independent?Applied
- A single-elimination tournament has 16 equally skilled teams, pairing randomly each round.Applied
- A single-elimination tournament starts with n equally skilled teams, pairing…Applied
- A team wins each game of a best-of-seven series independently with probability 0.6.Applied
A summary of what candidates publicly report, not information from Five Rings. Processes change by year, role and office. QuantMax is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or recruiting for Five Rings.