I went through the interview process with Optiver. The process was intense, demanding, but above all, a good learning experience. This wasn't your average interview. Optiver seeks out the best, and their process clearly reflects that. From start to finish, I was challenged to demonstrate my skills and knowledge. Sometime there is multiple weeks inbetween the rounds, which is the only thing I found annoying that we couldn't get quicker through the process. There were several stages in the process, beginning with a phone interview, followed by an online test that covered mental math and sequences. This is where the steep learning curve began. I had to seriously brush up on my mental math skills. I found some online resources to help with my preparation, one of which were rankyourbrain and tradinginterview.com. The second site was immensely helpful as it was geared specifically towards trading interviews and provided me with valuable insights and practice material. Next, came the on-site interviews which were a mix of behavioral, technical, and more math. The technical questions were both interesting and challenging, covering diverse topics in trading and financial markets. The behavioral questions were aimed at understanding my thought process, problem-solving approach, and my fit within the Optiver culture. One of the things that stood out for me was how supportive the interviewers were. They encouraged me to think out loud and work through problems, providing prompts and guidance when necessary. This made the interview less intimidating and more of an interactive problem-solving session. However, I must mention, the intensity of the process can feel heavy. The level of difficulty and the pace of the interview stages can be overwhelming if you're not well-prepared. You need to understand the role, the company, and the industry. Practice your mental math, probability, and other technical skills. Also, you need to exercise the 'make me a market' game, which is part of the technical round. I've trained for this game at the trading interview platform as well, which was pretty similar to the real deal. The super day at the end is like an extender version of your technical interview. You also need to do the HR round again and you get to meet some traders from the trading floor.

spent about 1.5 months pretty much purely dedicated to preparing for interviews for all the pre-penultimate programs (Optiver, IMC, JS, SIG, Citadel, etc). I used these resources: Green book (Really good starter but I got bored of it after a few weeks) EverythingQuant (Went through literally every single interview prep question, went through the interview guides, and completed the probability course just to make sure I covered all bases) Briefly read through this guide Watched coding Jesus in my spare time (not sure if this helped directly lmao but he’s a great creator and very informative)