IMC Trading Interview Questions

Implement a Tic-Tac-Toe game.

What is a hashmap?

What is the difference between threading and multiprocessing?

Complete the function findValuation that returns the expected price of a house using linear interpolation, given arrays of historic house areas and prices. The function should round the result to the nearest integer. Function signature: findValuation(reqArea: int, area: list of int, price: list of int) -> int, where reqArea is the area of the candidate house, area[i] is the area of the ith house sold, and price[i] is its price. Constraints: 500 < reqArea < 10^5, 500 < area[i] < 10^5 for all i.

Is the total number of distinct unsigned 32-bit integers different from the total number of signed 32-bit integers?

Can an O(1) algorithm be made faster?

How would you explain the difference between a stack and a queue to a non-technical person?

What is the time complexity of various operations (such as insert, erase, and find) in std::set?

1) What is the minimum number of moves required for a knight to reach a target square on a chessboard when a bishop is also available? 2) Implement a stack that supports push, pop, peek, as well as sum and increment operations.

Describe the data structures and algorithms you would use to design a program that keeps track of checked-out books for a library. The system should be able to: 1) Check out books for a member who has a library card, 2) Process book returns, 3) Find all books that are overdue and identify who has them checked out, and 4) Find all books that will be due tomorrow. Note: New releases and popular books have shorter checkout periods than normal books.

Is an immutable object always thread safe?

Does searching through a sorted binary search tree always have better time complexity than performing binary search on a sorted array?

What is the Big O time complexity of operations performed on a heap? What about a hashmap?

How would you implement a trade matching engine? The API should support: 1) adding Buy/Sell orders, which should return a Trade if an existing order matches the new one; 2) deleting pending orders; 3) getting market depth or demand, i.e., the range of buy/sell prices and total volume of pending orders at each price.

1. Find the longest possible valid password in a given string. 2. Find the total number of stops an elevator takes to serve X people. 3. Find the number of unique countries in a 2D matrix.

In a 2D array of integers, adjacent positions (vertically or horizontally) are considered part of the same "country" if they contain the same integer. Given a 2D array of integers, compute the number of distinct countries in the array.

What is the difference between a Set and a List?

People are waiting for an elevator in a hotel that has floors numbered 0 to M. The elevator has a limit of X people and a weight limit of Y. There are N people standing in a queue at the ground floor. You are given two arrays: A[N], where each element is the weight of a person, and B[N], where each element is the floor each person wants to go to. The elevator goes up, stopping at each requested floor, then returns to the ground floor. Write a solution to determine how many times the elevator will stop.

Given a binary tree, return all nodes whose values are greater than those of all their ancestors (i.e., nodes that are visible from the root).

Determine if two given words are anagrams of each other.

You have a 100-story building and two balls that break when dropped from too high a floor. What is the minimum number of drops needed on average to determine the highest floor from which a ball can be safely dropped?

Given 20 horses and 5 tracks, what is the minimum number of races required to determine the three fastest horses, assuming you can race up to 5 horses at a time and there is no timing, only order of finish in each race?

What is the probability of rolling an increasing sequence when you roll a die three times?

You have a 4x4 grid and three balls. If you manage to get at least 2 balls in the same row or column, you win. What is the probability of winning?

How much would the average global sea level rise if the mass of Mount Everest was submerged into the ocean?

Draw a payoff diagram for a put option.

If you remove the two squares that are diagonally opposite each other from a chessboard, can you use 2x1 domino tiles to exactly cover the remaining squares?

You have a deck of 3 black cards and 3 red cards in random order. In a game, you turn over one card at a time; if it is red, you win a dollar, and if it is black, you lose a dollar. What is the fair price to pay to play this game?

What is 72 multiplied by 73?

The profits of traders A, B, and C follow independent uniform distributions from 0 EUR to 100,000 EUR. What is the probability that A > B and B > C?