Breaking into derivatives
Straight, practitioner-written guides on the part of the job that no course teaches: how to actually reach a trading, structuring or sales desk, what to say when you get there, and the mistakes that guarantee silence.
- 13 min read
Getting the Interview — how to land a derivatives desk seat
Why the graduate-portal route has a response rate near zero, where the seats actually are (buy side, insurers, brokers), and the three-line cold email that changes your odds by an order of magnitude.
Read the guide - 15 min read
How a Derivatives Desk Makes Money — the answer that ends most interviews
The three revenue lines of a market-making desk — spread, hedging efficiency and financing — with the formulas, the turbo worked end to end, and the flow that makes the dividend curve slope down. The single thing to read before a front-office interview.
Read the guide - 14 min read
Mental Math and Pricing Tricks — the numbers before you open a pricer
The 0.4 rule for an at-the-money option, the rule of 16, greeks converted to cash, put-call parity and the arbitrage checks. Almost everything a mental-math interview question is really testing comes down to one constant and one square root.
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