Bank of America Interview Questions
78 questions from Bank of America quant and strategist loops: derivatives pricing, time-series and statistics, market microstructure, stochastic processes, and clean coding.
Inside the Bank of America interview
Bank of America's quant and strategist interviews sit on the sell-side: derivatives pricing and risk, applied statistics and time-series, and the market microstructure behind execution and quoting. Expect to derive, then implement.
What they test
The biggest blocks are options-pricing / derivatives (Breeden-Litzenberger, variance-swap replication, discrete delta-hedging, Bachelier-vs-Black), statistics (sequential and A/B testing, VaR backtesting, FDR control, extreme-value tails), and time-series (cointegration, Kalman/HMM filtering, unit-root and structural breaks). Around them sit market microstructure (Glosten-Milgrom, Roll spread, Hasbrouck shares) and a steady run of algorithmic coding on streaming and array problems.
The recurring shapes
Risk and tail estimation recur constantly: VaR / Expected Shortfall via peaks-over-threshold, Kupiec-Christoffersen backtests, and Hill / GEV extremes. So does online estimation over streams (EWMA, Welford covariance, rolling percentiles, reservoir sampling). Pricing questions lean on the risk-neutral density and replication identity
How to approach
State the model and its assumptions first (measure, error structure, what's being held fixed), then push to a closed form or estimator before you code. For the streaming and coding problems, get a correct one-pass or O(n log n) solution and be explicit about numerical stability. Connect each derivation back to P&L and risk — that framing is what the strategist and QR loops reward.
The mix skews hard with a medium core and a handful of easier warm-ups, so budget time for the derivation-heavy derivatives and statistics questions.
Bank of America coding questions (23)
- K-th Smallest Pair Sum
- Longest Increasing Subsequence with Reconstruction
- Greedy Interval Covering of Sorted Points
- Reservoir Sampling from an Unknown-Length Stream
- Trade-to-Quote As-Of Join
- Weighted Reservoir Sampling
- Streaming Expected Shortfall in a Sliding Window
- Fast Kendall's Tau via Modified Merge Sort
- Sliding Window Median Data Structure
- 2D Fenwick Tree for Rectangle Sum Queries
- Space-Saving Algorithm for Heavy Hitters
- Streaming Rolling 95th Percentile
- Count Subarrays Divisible by m
- Online EWMA Mean and Variance
- Count Subarrays with Sum in a Range
- Russian Doll Envelopes (2D LIS)
- All-Pairs Two-Sum With Stable Ordering
- 24 Game Solver
- LFU Cache
- Sliding Window Maximum with a Monotonic Deque
- Longest Subarray With Sum K
- Find the Missing Number in a Sequence
- Split Array to Minimize the Largest Subarray Sum
Bank of America statistics questions (13)
- Online Covariance and Correlation (Welford-Style)
- ROC AUC as the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney Statistic
- GEV Log-Likelihood and Fisher Information for Block Maxima
- Hill Estimator and Extreme Quantile Confidence Intervals
- Benjamini-Hochberg FDR Control
- VaR Backtesting: Kupiec and Christoffersen Tests
- Sequential A/B Testing With Alpha-Spending Functions
- Sequential Probability Ratio Test for Poisson Arrivals
- GMM Estimation of CAPM Beta
- VaR and ES via Peaks-Over-Threshold
- One-Sided CUSUM for Detecting a Mean Shift
- Bayesian Coin: Posterior, Predictive, and Betting Decision
- Bayesian Regression with Zellner's g-Prior
Bank of America options pricing questions (9)
- Discrete Delta-Hedging Error
- Barrier Digital Option via Brownian Bridge Correction
- Variance Swap Fair Strike via Log-Contract Replication
- Breeden-Litzenberger Formula
- Call Price Monotonicity in Time to Expiry and Gamma Comparison
- Avellaneda-Stoikov Optimal Quotes with CARA Utility
- Variance Reduction for Monte Carlo Option Pricing
- Bachelier vs Black Volatility Mapping
- Securitization Tranche Waterfall: Simulation and Analytic Loss
Bank of America time series questions (9)
- Johansen Cointegration Trace Test
- Yule-Walker Equations, PACF, and AR Order Selection
- Two-State Volatility HMM and the Hamilton Filter
- Unit Root Testing With a Structural Break
- Time-Series Cross-Validation Without Lookahead Bias
- Stochastic Volatility and Particle Filtering
- Cointegration: Engle-Granger Procedure and Error Correction
- Time-Varying Beta via Kalman Filter
- Detecting Multiple Structural Breaks via Dynamic Programming
Bank of America regression questions (6)
Bank of America market microstructure questions (4)
Bank of America optimization questions (4)
Bank of America stochastic processes questions (4)
Bank of America probability questions (3)
Bank of America expected value questions (1)
Bank of America game theory questions (1)
Bank of America brain teasers questions (1)
Bank of America interview FAQ
What kind of questions does Bank of America ask in quant interviews?
Candidates most often report coding, statistics and options pricing questions. This page collects 78 of them, 78 stamped with the month they were last reported — each with a full worked solution.
How hard are Bank of America interview questions?
The set spans 5 easy, 21 medium and 52 hard problems. Most sit at medium difficulty — solvable in a few minutes with clean reasoning — with a harder tail that rewards knowing the canonical tricks.
How do I prepare for the Bank of America quant interview?
Work through this set by topic (use the sidebar), starting from your weakest area. 11 problems are free to open with their full solution, so you can judge the quality before anything else. Then broaden out with the related firms below — the question families overlap heavily.
Are these the actual Bank of America interview questions?
They are built from candidate-reported Bank of America questions. We rewrite each prompt for clarity and author the worked solutions ourselves — we don't claim the wording is verbatim, and we never invent questions or recycle generic lists. 78 of 78 carry the month they were last reported.