Morgan Stanley Quant (Strats). There are 2-3 rounds total, and I just finished round two. I'm not sure if round three will be a superday or just a chat with the MD.
Round one was a straightforward LeetCode-style question, the same for everyone regardless of team — 30 minutes of live coding. Not hard, it tested a greedy algorithm, and once you saw it was greedy it clicked instantly.
Round two was 1.5 hours of pure technical interview, no behavioral component, no live coding. Three back-to-back 30-minute segments, with a huge volume of questions.
The first interviewer mainly tested options pricing. It started from futures pricing and built step by step toward options. The math itself wasn't hard to work out, but they kept pushing on the intuition behind it — for example, if you said the futures formula is K = S0 * exp(rt), they'd keep asking what the intuition behind that was.
The second interviewer was purely about linear regression assumptions, pretty standard. They liked asking for exact formulas — the expression for beta, the OLS expression, that kind of thing. There were also some probability questions, straight out of the classic green-book playbook — not hard, but there were a lot of them.
In the third segment they had me design an algorithm — no need to actually code it, just describe the approach, mainly to see how I thought. Several algorithm questions like that in a row, not hard, but they required thinking backward.
My brain rusted at the algorithm part — I couldn't come up with a really simple trick of working backward from the end, and I felt the interviewer was kind of speechless about it. Not sure if I'll still get pulled through. Also, a 1.5-hour round two is pretty rare in itself — I don't know what round three will look like, will the superday be even longer? Would love to hear people's thoughts!
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