Blog
Essays on the things clients get wrong, and one or two on the things nobody writes about at all. Longer and more technical than is fashionable, because the useful part is usually in the detail.
MBA and the GMAT
GMAT or GRE for an MBA? What the class profiles show
Harvard's Class of 2027 sent more GRE scores than GMAT Focus scores. The test mix and median scores at four schools, and how to choose.
Read the GMAT or GRE piece → BExecutive MBA deadlines for 2027 entry
Seventeen programmes, from Wharton, LBS and Oxford to CEIBS, TRIUM and EMBA-Global, with every deadline still ahead, read from each school's own site.
See the deadlines → BLBS MBA interview questions, from someone who asks them
The questions an LBS MBA or EMBA interview usually covers, how to answer each, and what makes an interview easy to write up well.
Read the LBS interview piece → BHow to score in the 99th percentile on the GMAT
715 and above is the 99th percentile on the GMAT Focus Edition. What the top 1% do differently, a ten-week plan, and why quant candidates lose points on Verbal.
Read the GMAT piece → BIs an MBA worth it?
The real cost, what graduates earn, the break-even arithmetic, and the cases where it clearly pays and where it clearly does not, for people in finance and tech.
Read the MBA value piece → BWhy I chose London Business School
Why a quant chose LBS for an MBA, what the programme is like, what it costs, and what I look for now that I interview LBS applicants.
Read the LBS piece →University admissions
Oxford and Cambridge acceptance rates by course
Cambridge computer science admitted 7.4% of applicants; Cambridge maths made offers to a quarter and admitted fewer than half of them. Why.
Read the acceptance rates → UMIT's acceptance rate for international students
136 of 6,926 international applicants admitted for the Class of 2029, about 2%, against 4.6% overall. The scores, early action and aid.
Read the MIT figures →Technical
The market-making interview game, played out
One round with numbers: the opening width, being lifted, updating, leaning the quote, and how far an informed trader should move your price.
Play the round → AMental maths for trading interviews: how to get faster
Round and correct, squares, fractions by heart, division by factors, a nines check, and the arithmetic of when to skip under negative marking.
Read the shortcuts → AHow to solve a stochastic differential equation
The four moves interviewers test: Itô on the right function, an integrating factor, moment equations and the scale function, each with a worked example.
Read the four moves → AQuant trader, quant researcher or quant developer
What each is answerable for, what eight trading firms pay each role in their own US adverts, and how each interview differs.
Compare the three roles → ALow-latency C++ interview questions, and what a good answer sounds like
Twelve questions trading firms ask developers, from cache lines and atomics to page faults and order books, with the trap in each and the shape of an answer that lands.
Read the questions → AImplementing machine learning from scratch in an interview
Softmax, backpropagation, attention, batch norm, k-means, PCA and AUC in NumPy, and the one detail in each that fails candidates.
Read the details → AQuant intern pay in 2027, from the firms' own adverts
Jane Street, Citadel, Jump, IMC, SIG and Two Sigma print their 2027 intern pay in US adverts. The figures, what an "annual" intern salary means, and what a summer adds up to.
See the figures → AThe best quant interview prep for 2027
The books and practice sites worth your time, compared by role, and what to skip.
Read the article → AA quant interview study plan: eight weeks to the final round
Probability, mental maths, brainteasers, markets and code, week by week, with a bar to clear before you move on and the practice to clear it with.
Read the plan → AWhy I wrote 554 practice questions
Why the bank is this large, where the questions came from, why the solutions are longer than the questions, and the three I had to pull after publishing them.
Read it → AQuant interview questions, with worked solutions
Expected value, gambler's ruin, conditioning, market making and mental maths: five question types, each solved the way an interviewer wants to hear it.
Read the worked questions → AWhat a quant interview is actually testing
The mathematics is the entry ticket. What decides the outcome is the ninety seconds after you realise you have no answer, and the stochastic calculus you can safely ignore.
Read the quant interview piece → CReading a MAT question the way an examiner does
Why students with perfect school marks come out of MAT mocks in the forties, and why the reflex that made them successful is the thing working against them.
Read the Oxford admissions piece → A209 quant interview questions, with answers
Probability, brainteasers, stochastic calculus, statistics and ML, market making and mental maths. Browse by topic or take a timed quiz.
Open the question bank →On the wider question
What people are buying when they buy an MBA
Two hundred thousand pounds and two years. What that money actually purchases, which is not what the brochures say and not what the cynics say either.
Read the MBA piece → ·The night shift and the problem set
On the students who work while they study, what those hours cost them, and why I have learned to bet on the tired ones.
Read the night shift piece → ·Decision day — a poem
For anyone refreshing an inbox at one in the morning in January. Written in Poe's metre, which fitted the subject better than it had any right to.
Read the poem →A problem every week
Pick a subject and you get one problem a week with a full worked solution. Real questions of the kind that decide these things, not warm-ups. Free, and one email a week with nothing else in it.