Sales and Trading Interview Prep: Questions, Markets Knowledge, and Drills

JPMorgan's posting for its 2027 Markets Summer Analyst program asked candidates who advanced to complete a recorded video interview and a math test, and made both required, so your mental math can be tested before you've spoken to a single trader. Speed with numbers is one of four things the process checks. A sales and trading interview tests your reason for choosing markets, your read on current markets, your product knowledge, and your math speed. Each takes a different kind of work, and the slow-building ones, like following markets, need to start first.

I'm Stephen Turban, founder of WSG. I went to Harvard and worked at McKinsey, and I've run a lot of mock technical interviews with students headed into banking. By the end of this guide you'll have a fit answer built on something you've done, a short list of market levels to track, one product area to know well, a trade pitch that fits in 90 seconds, and a daily drill that covers every question type in under an hour.

What the Interview Process Looks Like

At most large banks, a sales and trading interview starts with a recorded video screen and ends with a day of back-to-back live interviews. In North America, the usual path is an online application, then a HireVue video or phone interview, then a Superday, as Mergers & Inquisitions describes it. The first screen can test your math as well as your answers. JPMorgan's posting for its 2027 Markets Summer Analyst program, for example, invited candidates who advanced to complete a video interview and a math test, both on HireVue, and made both required.

The Four Types of Sales and Trading Interview Questions

The mix of questions shifts with the seat you're interviewing for. That JPMorgan posting described sales as building client relationships and helping clients with the bank's products, and trading as providing liquidity, responding to market events, and managing risk. Sales interviews tend to lean toward communication and how you'd handle a client, while trading interviews tend to lean harder on math and on how you think about risk. Both get asked about markets.

Question type	Examples	What it checks
Fit	Why sales and trading rather than investment banking? What's the biggest risk you've taken?	Whether your reasons for the job are real and whether you'd suit a desk
Markets	Where is the S&P 500? What will happen with interest rates over the next six months? Pitch me a stock.	Whether you follow markets and can form a view
Product	What is convexity? How does the yield curve work?	Whether you understand what a desk actually trades
Math and brainteasers	What is the probability of flipping three heads and one tail?	How fast and how clearly you work with numbers

The examples come from Vault's list of common questions and eFinancialCareers' list of 20 questions banks ask salespeople and traders.

Fit Questions: Why Markets, and Why Sales or Trading

The fit answers that work give a reason for choosing markets that comes from something you've actually done. "Why sales and trading rather than investment banking?" is the one to prepare first, and the way in is to think about what in your personality and past work makes you better suited to markets. Saying you like working with clients doesn't separate the two, because bankers work with clients too. A reason that does separate them sounds like this: you've kept a daily note on one market for a semester, you found you cared most about how prices reacted to each new data release, and you want a job where you make calls on those prices every day.

For sales, show that you like persuading people and keeping a relationship going. In Vault's words, for salespeople, "the important thing is that you love to sell." For trading, the risk question is the one to prepare. When an interviewer asks for the biggest risk you've taken, they want to hear that you researched the decision and judged the risk worth taking, whatever the outcome. Traders are paid to take appropriate risks, as Vault puts it, so a story about a reckless bet that happened to work out lands badly.

Build each story with a clear situation, what you did, and what came of it. WSG's guide to the STAR method in finance interviews covers that structure.

Markets Questions: The Levels to Know and How to Follow Them

Before any sales and trading interview, know the current level and recent direction of a short list of markets, and be able to say why each one moved. Knowing that the S&P 500 is up this month answers only half of a markets question, because the natural follow-up is what moved it.

Mergers & Inquisitions suggests knowing recent levels and six-to-twelve-month trends across equities, credit, FX, commodities, and rates. The table covers four of those, plus what the market expects from the Fed. If you're aiming for a credit desk, also add the credit indexes the guide lists, such as CDX NA IG, CDX NA HY, and iTraxx Europe.

Market	What to know	Where to check
Equities	S&P 500, Dow, VIX, and one index outside the US	A markets section such as the WSJ's or the FT's
Rates	Fed funds target range, 2-year and 10-year Treasury yields	Treasury's interest rate statistics (Daily Treasury Par Yield Curve Rates)
Fed expectations	What the market expects at the next Fed meeting	CME FedWatch and the Fed's meeting calendar
FX	EUR/USD, USD/JPY, GBP/USD	A markets section such as the WSJ's or the FT's
Commodities	Oil and gold	A markets section such as the WSJ's or the FT's

The Fed's rate-setting committee has eight scheduled meetings a year, and the date of the next one tells you when rate views get tested. FedWatch shows the probabilities of a rate change at upcoming meetings, as implied by 30-day fed funds futures prices. That's the market's current bet, and it's one example of what an interviewer means when they ask whether something is "priced in." If you say you expect a cut, the natural next question is whether the market already expects it too.

To keep all of this current, read one markets section every morning and write two or three sentences on what moved and why. Writing it down matters, because the interview asks you to explain moves out loud, and a sentence you've written is easier to say. After a few weeks, you'll have a running record of the last month's moves, which is exactly what "What have markets done recently?" asks for.

Product Questions: Go Deep on One Desk's Products

Product questions follow the desk you say you want, so choose one product area and learn how its prices move. Mergers & Inquisitions recommends knowing one product deeply. Rates and credit interviews ask about bond math such as duration and convexity; FX interviews ask what drives currencies, such as fiscal and monetary policy, trade balances, inflation, and growth; and equity derivatives interviews ask about the Greeks.

For rates, the idea underneath most questions is that bond prices move the opposite way to interest rates. An existing bond's coupon is fixed, so when market rates rise, new bonds pay more interest than the old one, and the old bond's price falls until its yield is competitive with theirs. Duration tells you by roughly how much. PIMCO's rule of thumb is that a bond with a duration of 10 would lose about 10% if rates rose by one percentage point. So if you're asked what happens to a bond with a duration of 7 when yields fall by 25 basis points, the answer is that it gains about 1.75%, because 7 times 0.25% is 1.75%.

Convexity measures how much a bond's price-yield relationship curves, and it explains why the duration estimate is only approximate. Duration treats that relationship as a straight line. For an ordinary fixed-rate bond, the CFA Institute's reading on convexity explains that the price rises a little more than duration suggests when yields fall, and drops a little less when yields rise.

For FX, start with interest rates, because they change where investors want to hold money. As a Congressional Research Service brief on the strong dollar puts it, "Higher interest rates in the U.S. economy relative to foreign economies make U.S. assets more attractive," so investors buy dollars to invest in U.S. assets and the dollar rises. Run the same logic in reverse and a Fed cut that other central banks don't match tends to weaken the dollar against their currencies.

For equity derivatives, start with delta, which measures how much an option's price changes for a $1 move in the stock. A call option with a delta of 0.50 gains about 50 cents per share when the stock rises $1. WSG's 30 sales and trading interview terms defines the other Greeks, the yield curve, investment grade versus high yield, and the rest of the vocabulary a desk uses, with practice questions for several of the terms. Interviewers test whether you can explain these terms in plain words, so practice saying each one out loud with an example, the way delta is explained here.

How to Pitch a Trade in 90 Seconds

A trade pitch states what you'd buy or sell, the event that will move it, why the market hasn't already priced that in, and where you'd take profit or cut the loss. Aim for 60 to 90 seconds, the length Mergers & Inquisitions suggests, built around a catalyst, your edge, and a brief mention of the profit target, stop loss, timeframe, and key risks. Keeping it short leaves time for the follow-up questions, which is where the interviewer learns whether you understand the trade.

The same guide suggests having three ideas ready: one long, one short, and one macro idea in FX, government bonds, or commodities. Having more than one also lets you match the person across the table. Vault makes that point about a related question, how you'd invest $1 million: don't recommend high-yield bonds to an equity salesperson.

The numbers in this example pitch are made up:

Example pitch: "I'd buy 2-year Treasury notes. Futures imply about a 40% chance the Fed cuts at its next meeting, and I think it's higher, because the last two inflation reports came in below forecasts. The 2-year's yield reacts more to Fed expectations than longer yields do, so it should fall the most if the market reprices toward a cut. My target is 20 basis points lower in yield and my stop is 10 basis points higher, held through the next meeting. The main risk is a strong jobs report before then."

Each part of that pitch answers a question the interviewer would otherwise ask. The catalyst is the next Fed meeting, which gives the trade a timeframe. The edge is the gap between your view and the 40% the market is pricing, which shows you checked what's already expected. The instrument choice has a reason: CNBC describes the 2-year as "the part of the curve most sensitive to Fed policy." The target and stop show you've sized the payoff. Assuming a duration of about 2, a 20-basis-point fall in yield is roughly a 0.4% gain and a 10-basis-point rise is roughly a 0.2% loss, so you're risking one to make two.

Mental Math and Brainteasers

Expect some mental math in most sales and trading processes, sometimes as a timed online test, and expect brainteasers mostly if you're interviewing for trading. The math test in JPMorgan's HireVue screen is one example of the timed version. Brainteasers are less predictable. Mergers & Inquisitions says sales candidates are extremely unlikely to get them and that they're more common at prop trading and quant firms than at large banks.

For speed, Zetamac is a free arithmetic game that gives you 120 seconds of mixed addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division in its default settings. A short daily round builds the habit of answering quickly without a calculator, and because it scores you, you can see whether you're getting faster.

For brainteasers, the skill is thinking out loud: state your assumptions, and if you get stuck, say what you'd need to keep going. Vault's coin question shows why. If you've flipped three heads, the chance the fourth flip is tails is still 50%, because each flip is independent. If the question is the chance of getting exactly three heads in four flips, there are 16 equally likely sequences and 4 of them have exactly three heads, so the answer is 25%. If it means one specific order, such as heads, heads, heads, then tails, it's 1 in 16, or 6.25%. Saying which version you're answering, and why, is part of the answer. For more practice, Timothy Crack's Heard on the Street collects quantitative, logic, derivatives, statistics, and financial economics questions from Wall Street interviews.

Daily Drills Until Your Superday

A daily routine of short drills covers every question type in about 50 minutes, and it suits this interview because markets knowledge and math speed both build through repetition.

Drill	Time	What it builds
Read one markets section and write what moved and why	15 minutes	Markets questions and a record of recent moves
Check the levels in the markets table above	5 minutes	Quick, accurate answers to "Where is...?"
Two rounds of Zetamac	5 minutes	Speed on the math test and in live interviews
Say one product term out loud with an example	5 minutes	Product questions for your chosen desk
Rehearse one of your three trade pitches, timed	5 minutes	A pitch that fits in 90 seconds
A brainteaser, solved out loud	10 minutes	Thinking out loud under pressure
Tell one fit story out loud, timed	5 minutes	Fit answers that stay short and specific

Once a week, do a full mock interview with someone who will ask follow-up questions, because the follow-ups are where a prepared answer gets tested. A friend who has interviewed for markets roles is ideal, since they know which answers hold up.

Start the markets habit before you apply. JPMorgan's 2027 posting said it would fill its classes on a rolling basis, and a recorded screen can arrive soon after you apply, so your levels and pitches should already be current when you submit. For when applications open and how the summer works, see WSG's guide to landing a sales and trading internship.