Quant Interview Questions from Squarepoint Capital
In this article, we will break down several classic quant interview questions, including those from Squarepoint Capital, J.P. Morgan, and Jane Street. We will solve each question step-by-step, explaining all the underlying concepts in detail. Whether you are preparing for a quant interview or simply want to deepen your problem-solving skills, these questions provide valuable insights into what elite firms look for in candidates.
Given an unsorted list of n numbers, efficiently find the K largest elements in the list.
Suppose you have a list of numbers of length n and you wish to find the K largest distinct elements. A naive approach would be to sort the list, which would take O(n \log n) time, and then pick the last K elements. But can we do better?
