The most common LeetCode questions in banks, hedge funds and trading firms

A technical job in financial services is rarely achieved without completing a LeetCode-style assessment of some sort. There are thousands of LeetCode questions you could practice to prepare for this interview stage, but some are more common than others.

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We've analyzed 576 unique LeetCode questions asked by 31 different financial services firms*. The question that appeared more than any other was one directly relevant to finance: Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock. It was asked by nine out of fourteen banks, four out of eight hedge funds and one of eight electronic trading firms. The firms that ask this question most often are Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and Citadel. 

Different firms will have their favourites. Not included in the top ten is Trapping Rain Water, a question known to be a favourite of Goldman Sachs. The question has also been asked by multiple hedge funds including D.E. Shaw and Squarepoint. 

The spread of easy, medium and hard-ranked questions differs between sectors. The proportion of hard questions asked by hedge funds is almost double that of banks. Curiously, electronic trading firms ask the highest proportion of easy questions; interviews there often have multiple technical stages including a more complex system design stage, so the easier questions may be a conscious decision to cast a wider net. The average acceptance rate (the percentage of programs submitted that are successful) is roughly the same in each sector at around 55-58%.

How much LeetCode do you need to do to get a job in finance?

AI coding tools have cast a lot of doubt on the efficiency of LeetCode questions as a tool to filter out candidates. Some would say they were never useful in the first place. The amount of LeetCode you'll need to practice most likely correlates to the volume of LeetCode questions asked by the firm you want to apply for; Goldman Sachs asked the most unique LeetCode questions of any firm we analyzed, and a 2024 study found that Goldman employees had solved an average of 452 questions.

You don't need to be particularly 'cracked' at solving problems either. That 2024 study found that employees at JPMorgan, which asks the second most unique questions, had an average score of 1,500, the starting score for new LeetCode users. Goldman Sachs had a marginally greater average score of 1,602.

Recruiters have suggested that, for roles in hedge funds and trading firms, there has been an increased emphasis on non-technical interview stages for technical roles in a post-AI world. Peter Wagner, managing director of recruitment firm Affinity North, said earlier this year that behavioural (culture fit) interviews have "grown in importance" and that you "don’t want to make up your answers to behavioral questions on the spot." If you're already above average at LeetCode, reaching out to employees at the firm you want to join or researching the culture might be a more productive use of your time.

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*Goldman Sachs, Citi, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, HSBC, UBS, Barclays, BNP Paribas, BNY Mellon, Wells Fargo, Natwest, SocGen, Citadel, Millennium, Two Sigma, Point72, AQR, D.E. Shaw, Squarepoint, Jane Street, Hudson River Trading, Optiver, Akuna, Tower Research, Jump Trading, G-Research, DRW, Virtu Financial