Interview Prep
← Company guidesBuy-side vs Sell-side, Explained
“Quant” means different jobs on different sides of the market. Knowing which side you're targeting shapes what you study, how you interview, and the career you're signing up for.
Sell-side
Investment banks and broker-dealers, Goldman, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, BofA, Citi. They make markets, price and structure products, provide liquidity, execution, research, and risk services to clients, and manage the firm's own book and regulatory capital.
Buy-side
Asset owners and managers, hedge funds, asset managers, pension and mutual funds, and many prop firms. They deploy capital to generate returns (alpha). This is where systematic trading and alpha research live.
How the quant roles differ
Sell-side quants are usually organized by product/desk (rates, FX, equity derivatives). The work centers on derivatives pricing models, calibration, hedging, XVA, and risk / model validation, anchored in stochastic calculus and PDEs, and paired with heavy software engineering. Goldman calls them “Strats,” JPMorgan “QR,” Barclays “QA.”
Buy-side quants are organized by strategy / asset class and focus on alpha research, signal generation, systematic trading, portfolio construction, execution, and backtesting, leaning more on statistics, machine learning, and data than on closed-form pricing.
How the interviews differ
Sell-side emphasis
Probability, stochastic calculus, derivatives pricing (Black-Scholes, Itô), coding (C++/Python), and a notably heavier behavioral component.
Buy-side / prop emphasis
Fast mental math, probability and expected-value brainteasers, statistics and ML, and sometimes live trading / estimation games.
Comp, culture & career
As commonly described: the sell-side offers structured paths, broad training, and steadier (still strong) pay. The buy-side, especially hedge funds, offers higher pay ceilings tied to performance, more direct P&L exposure, and higher variance with less job security. Plenty of quants start on the sell-side and move buy-side once they know the products.
Where do prop shops fit?
Firms like Jane Street, Optiver, Citadel Securities, and HFT market makers are technically neither classic buy nor sell side, they trade their own capital. They're usually grouped with the buy-side or simply called “prop.” Their interviews are the most brainteaser-, mental-math-, and probability-intensive of all, which is exactly what the question bank is built to train.
Synthesized from public industry sources; general consensus, hedged where firm-specific.