• This book is a must read! Heard on The Street is the first and the original book of quantitative questions from finance job interviews. Painstakingly revised over 30 years and 25 editions, Heard on The Street has been shaped by feedback from many hundreds of readers. With over 75,000 copies in print, its readership is unmatched by any competing book.

• The revised 25th edition (ISBN 978-1-9911554-8-1; August 2024) contains 242 quantitative questions collected from actual job interviews in investment banking, investment management, and options trading. The interviewers use the same questions year-after-year, and here they are with detailed solutions!

• This edition also includes 267 non-quantitative actual interview questions, giving a total of more than 500 actual finance job interview questions. There is also a revised section on interview technique based on Dr. Crack's experiences interviewing candidates and also based on feedback from interviewers and interviewees worldwide.

• Questions that appeared in (or are likely to appear in) traditional corporate finance job interviews (mostly investment banking) are indicated with a bank symbol in the margin (72 of the quant questions and 196 of the non-quant questions). This makes it easier for corporate finance candidates to go directly to the questions most relevant to them. Most of these questions also appeared in capital markets interviews and quant interviews. So, they should not be skipped over by capital markets or quant candidates unless they are obviously irrelevant.

• I noticed that one critical Amazon reviewer states that the same or better information is freely available on the Internet. My experience, however, is that many solutions to quantitative questions posted on various Web sites are incorrect. The ones that are correct are often poorly explained. The ones that are correct and well explained often overlook a more elegant solution technique. You will also often find conflicting answers to the same question when you look at multiple sources. Where is the quality control? On top of this, searching the Web means that you have to use your very valuable interview preparation time to search high and low for these questions and answers, rather than having them laid out in front of you.

  The benefit of this book is that I have done the work for you. That's what you are paying for. The questions and answers are all in one place, carefully edited over many years based on feedback from hundreds of readers. Plus, the book has been recently updated to include the latest popular questions. Also, unlike many contributors to Web sites, I have a degree in mathematics (with lots of statistics), plus a degree in finance, plus a degree in financial economics, plus a diploma in accounting, plus I did PhD coursework at Harvard and MIT, completed a PhD at MIT, and I have finance practitioner and finance consulting experience. On top of this, I have taught investments, derivatives, corporate finance, international financial management, and other courses, for over 30 years, and I have won a string of teaching awards for doing so. So, why would you risk your job interview preparation by trusting some anonymous post on some random Web site, when you can buy a book that more than 75,000 other people, including your interviewers, have trusted for more than two and a half decades? Why waste your valuable interview preparation time searching for questions and answers online when you can find them all here, carefully prepared for you with your interview in mind?

  (Writing in July 2018) Within the last 12 months, I have supplied 400 copies of this book to a well known university in New York who wanted to give a free copy to two successive cohorts of incoming quantitative masters students. I also supplied 70 copies to a well known west coast university for their cohort of quantitative masters students. These are the students you are competing with for jobs. If you are a student in a quantitative finance masters program and you want your school to provide this book to you, then ask the director of your program to contact me directly (just look me up using Google).

• The quant questions cover pure quant/logic, financial economics, derivatives, and statistics. They come from all types of interviews (corporate finance, sales and trading, quant research, etc.), and from all levels of interviews (undergraduate, MS, MBA, PhD).

• The first seven editions of Heard on the Street contained an appendix on option pricing basics. That appendix was carved out as a stand alone book (Basic Black-Scholes) in 2004, and it is now available in its revised sixth edition (hardcopy and eBook).

• One in every three copies of Heard on the Street is sold to an interviewer. There is a good chance that you will face one of those interviewers.

• When Heard on the Street first appeared, it contained questions collected directly from students after interviews. It still does, but nowadays the interviewers at top firms also contribute new questions directly! For example, one interviewer at a big-name New York investment bank recently sent the bank's latest full written quantitative interview test with 30 questions (and answers)! The great majority were very similar to those already in the book.

• Why do interviewers at top firms supply their interview questions to put in a book to sell to their job candidates? Because job candidates who make a serious investment of time in revising the questions and answers are signalling that they deserve to be hired!

• Heard on the Street is a soft cover phone-book sized paperback and approximately 400 pages in total (350 pages of text, 20 pages of frontmatter and backmatter, 30 pages of references plus index).

• more details...

• Dr. Timothy Falcon Crack did PhD coursework at MIT and Harvard, and graduated with a PhD in Financial Economics from MIT. He has degrees in Mathematics (with a lot of Statistics), Finance, and Financial Economics and a diploma in Accounting/Finance. He also holds the Investment Management Certificate from the UK Society of Investment Professionals. He has won six university teaching awards and been nominated for at least five others.

• Dr. Crack has published in the top academic journal in Finance (The Journal of Finance), the top practitioner-oriented journals in Finance (The Financial Analysts Journal and The Journal of Futures Markets), and the top pedagogical journal in Finance (The Journal of Financial Education). He has also published in what was the top interdisciplinary Business journal (The Journal of Business). He has written seven sole-authored finance books (the following links direct you to the latest editions for sale at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk):
  • "How to Ace Your Business Finance Class"
  • "Heard on The Street: Quantitative Questions from Wall Street Job Interviews" (a full-sized edition and two pocket-sized editions)
  • "Basic Black-Scholes: Option Pricing and Trading"
  • "Foundations for Scientific Investing"
  • "Foundations for Scientific Investing: Test Questions"

• Dr. Crack taught at the university level from 1985 to 2000, and again from 2004 to 2021, including four years as a front line teaching assistant for MBA students at MIT, and five years teaching undergraduate, MBA and PhD courses at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business. He is now a Professor Emeritus of Finance at the oldest university in New Zealand.

• Dr. Crack has worked as an independent consultant to the New York Stock Exchange and to a foreign government body investigating wrong doing in the financial markets. He previously held a practitioner job as the head of a quantitative active equity research team at what was the world's largest institutional money manager.

Click here to be directed to the latest edition(s) for sale at Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk (as part of a list containing every book I have written plus some other favorites).

 

Reviews....

You can read MORE THAN 60 REVIEWS of this edition and recent previous editions by clicking on the "(11 customer reviews)" type links at Amazon.com and at Amazon.co.uk.

Contacts & Errata & Downloads

• Ask the author a question timcrack@alum.mit.edu (on average one week before reply).
• ERRATA (known errors and corrections).
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• If this book is not what you want, please email the URL to a friend who is job hunting in investment banking, trading or money management. Your tip could save them from disaster!

Last Updated: August 31, 2024