Chicago Trading Company (CTC) Interview Questions
An options market-making practice mix for CTC's Quant Trader and Quant Researcher loops: option pricing and Greeks, bid-ask quoting under adverse selection, probability, EV, and fast brain-teasers.
Inside the Chicago Trading Company (CTC) interview
Chicago Trading Company (CTC) is a Chicago-based options market maker and proprietary trading firm. Its Quant Trader and Quant Researcher interviews emphasize option pricing intuition, quoting under adverse selection, and quick, clean probability and expected-value reasoning under time pressure.
What they test
The core is options — put-call parity and arbitrage, one-step binomial pricing, digital and straddle Greeks, and short-option P&L. Sitting alongside it is market-making: Glosten-Milgrom zero-profit quotes and pricing against an informed trader. The rest is a probability / expectation / brain-teaser base — Gambler's Ruin, St. Petersburg, EV-vs-Kelly bet sizing, and classic puzzles.
The recurring shapes
Many problems reduce to a few moves: replicate a payoff and invoke no-arbitrage, set a quote so expected profit is zero given who might trade against you, or compute a clean expectation and compare it to a price. Put-call parity is the workhorse for the option questions.
How to approach
Quote a two-sided market fast, then defend it: state your fair value, your edge, and how an informed counterparty shifts your bid and ask. For pricing, anchor on replication and parity before reaching for formulas; for EV puzzles, compute the number first and only then debate whether you'd take the bet.
The set leans medium with a handful of easy warm-ups and a few hard market-making questions, mirroring a CTC loop that rewards speed plus sound option intuition.
Chicago Trading Company (CTC) probability questions (6)
Chicago Trading Company (CTC) options pricing questions (6)
Chicago Trading Company (CTC) expected value questions (4)
Chicago Trading Company (CTC) game theory questions (3)
Chicago Trading Company (CTC) market microstructure questions (3)
Chicago Trading Company (CTC) combinatorics questions (1)
Chicago Trading Company (CTC) brain teasers questions (1)
Chicago Trading Company (CTC) interview FAQ
What kind of questions does Chicago Trading Company (CTC) ask in quant interviews?
Candidates most often report probability, options pricing and expected value questions. This page collects 24 of them, 4 stamped with the month they were last reported — each with a full worked solution.
How hard are Chicago Trading Company (CTC) interview questions?
The set spans 5 easy, 19 medium and 0 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 Chicago Trading Company (CTC) quant interview?
Work through this set by topic (use the sidebar), starting from your weakest area. 8 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 Chicago Trading Company (CTC) interview questions?
They are built from candidate-reported Chicago Trading Company (CTC) 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. 4 of 24 carry the month they were last reported.