📚 Technical Trainer
Every S&T interview technical, taught foundationally and drilled with infinite desk situations until it's reflex. Short teach, then the drill.
Endless adaptive drill across everything you've unlocked, weighted to what you're weakest on. Three misses end a scored shift.
Your error log, scheduled: concepts whose review interval has lapsed come back here first.
Ten mixed questions, identical for everyone today, one scored attempt. A one-day grace keeps the streak honest.
Three interviewers, eighteen questions with follow-up chains, escalating difficulty, graded like the real thing.
Pitch me a trade: thesis → expression → catalyst → carry → risk, checked against what an interviewer listens for. Save it, then pitch it again from memory.
Central-bank heads, rates and dates, yields, FX, oil, gold, indices, VIX, spreads, latest prints. Keep it fresh, then quiz yourself on your own numbers.
0. 🏦 How the floor works
Before any maths: what a markets desk actually does, who sits where, and who the clients are. Every technical question is really about one of these three things.
Market making, warehousing risk, the franchise — and why it's not prop trading.
"Name three desks and what they do." FICC isn't a desk.
Real money, fast money, corporates, central banks — and what each wants from you.
1. 📐 Bond maths foundations
🔒 boss: Reach level 2 in every Bond maths foundations concept (0/6)Price, yield, duration, DV01, convexity. This is what a rates interviewer actually tests — Hull chapters 1–7 and bond maths, not derivatives theory. Everything later (curve trades, swaps, hedging) is built on these five ideas.
Why a bond is worth the sum of its discounted cash flows — and why price and yield are one fact seen two ways.
2. 📈 The yield curve
🔒 boss: Reach level 2 in every The yield curve concept (0/7)Why the curve has the shape it has, how to name its moves, how forwards fall out of it, how to build and size a curve trade, what it costs to hold one, and what central banks and data do to it. This is the rates conversation.
3. 🔧 Rates products & hedging
🔒 boss: Reach level 2 in every Rates products & hedging concept (0/5)Swaps, bond futures and repo are the tools a rates desk uses to move DV01 around. This unit ends with the hedge desk: given any position, build the perfect offset and name what's left.
4. 🎲 Options
🔒 boss: Reach level 2 in every Options concept (0/6)Say 'equity derivs' and you get Greeks. This unit builds from what an option is, to the sign table you must know cold, to delta hedging with numbers, parity, and why Black–Scholes is wrong but used anyway.
5. 🌍 Credit & FX
🔒 boss: Reach level 2 in every Credit & FX concept (0/5)The two desks a superday interviewer is most likely to come from after rates. Credit is rates plus a spread; FX is interest parity plus risk sentiment. Both reuse everything above.
6. 🎯 Interview games
Brainteasers at BBs are basic — one EV or Bayes question per superday, not a gauntlet. The skill is composure: structure aloud, round aggressively, act on expected value.
Mastery: five straight correct at a level moves you up; three misses in five moves you down; a concept left past its review date fades a level until you revisit it. Speed bonuses only count once you're above 90% accuracy — accuracy first, then compress time.