Arrowstreet Capital Superday Written Exam Interview

The Arrowstreet Capital Superday Written Exam interview is stage 3 of 4 in the Arrowstreet Capital interview process, after the HackerRank CodePair. Format: Paper-based written exam opening the Boston superday - statistics and asset-pricing derivations by hand. Candidate-reported (pooled from four 2025-26 accounts): the onsite opens with a paper test of statistics and asset pricing, closed-form derivations not computation.

What the Superday Written Exam tests

QuantVault maps 6 practice problems to this round. By topic, the biggest groups are finance (3), optimization (1), regression (1), time series (1); by difficulty, 0 easy, 4 medium and 2 hard. 5 of them were reported by candidates who interviewed at Arrowstreet Capital, most recently in Nov 2025.

• A written exam is part of the Boston superday.

How to prepare for the Superday Written Exam

• ERC algebra cold -- RC_i = w_i (Sigma w)_i sums to portfolio variance (Euler); two assets give w_1 sigma_1 = w_2 sigma_2 whatever the correlation; inverse-vol is ERC iff the correlation matrix has equal row sums, so it fails as soon as correlations differ.
• Product of the two slopes is R-squared -- both lines pass through the mean point and coincide only when |r| = 1; explain why OLS is not symmetric (vertical versus horizontal residuals) before the interviewer asks.
• N_eff = N(1-rho)/(1+rho) -- derive it from Var(sum x_t) with the cross terms, then shrink the t-stat by sqrt(N_eff / N): at rho = 0.5 a t of 1.73 becomes 1.0. Name Newey-West as the general fix.
• Certainty equivalent is not the price -- under log utility the CE is the geometric mean of outcomes; the maximum price solves E[ln(W - P + payoff)] = ln W and comes out below the CE gain. Tie the sizing version to Kelly.
• Practice longhand, timed -- no notebook, no autocomplete, no numpy. The exam isolates written fluency; drill each derivation on paper until the algebra runs without pausing.

Further reading: How quant superdays work · Behavioral questions at trading firms · Market-making game interview guide.

Question types in this round

The 4 largest question types in the Arrowstreet Capital Superday Written Exam practice set; across them the most common sub-topics are portfolio theory, correlation. The questions themselves, with worked solutions, are in the round practice.

Common mistakes

• Derive, do not recall -- each reported item is a short derivation from a definition: Var(w'r) for portfolio risk, the slope formula r s_y / s_x for the two regressions, the double sum of rho^|s-t| for the autocorrelated mean, E[ln W] for the gamble. Write the definition first, then the algebra.

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