Our Interview With Hudson River Trading’s Head of Risk:
Hudson River Trading Interview A legendary firm on Wall Street where it is harder to acquire a job than it is to get into Harvard or Stanford. Furthermore, this impossible-to-work-for hedge fund has the ability of picking the very best quants in the world. Moreover, not just PHD’s from Harvard or Stanford, but the best PHD’s from Harvard or Stanford who have published works and possibly written books.
HRT as it is called fosters a technology meets Silicon Valley atmosphere where wearing Star Wars t-shirts puts you in the cooler ranks of employees.
Many classify HRT in the high-frequency trading (HFT) camp, but the firm claims to differ from stereotypical HFT firms in several important ways:
HRT holds about 25% of its trading capital overnight (unlike most HFT firms that hold almost nothing overnight).
HRT’s average holding time is about five minutes as opposed to the sub-second times observed for some HFT firms.
Lastly, HRT does less than 1% of its trading in dark pools. Dark pools are lightly regulated private trading venues under scrutiny from regulators.
The Process
It’s a pretty egalitarian system, submit your resume to HRT for a role, and it goes to the manager for screening.
Generally, the process will proceed in this order:
1. check the resume; 2. interview the guy, to check he/she/they are sufficiently rational; 3. remote coding test.
This is where lots of MS students fail.
There are about 6 interviews after these tests.
People who learn Python from stack overflow and/or are not actually math-inclined (not just learn a few fitting recipes) should just not apply.
HRT tries hard not to care about school of provenance.
Hudson River Trading Interview
