Blog
Essays on the things clients get wrong, and one or two on the things nobody writes about at all. Longer and more technical than is fashionable, because the useful part is usually in the detail.
MBA and the GMAT
Executive MBA deadlines for 2027 entry
Seventeen programmes, from Wharton, LBS and Oxford to CEIBS, TRIUM and EMBA-Global, with every deadline still ahead, read from each school's own site.
See the deadlines → BLBS MBA interview questions, from someone who asks them
The questions an LBS MBA or EMBA interview usually covers, how to answer each, and what makes an interview easy to write up well.
Read the LBS interview piece → BHow to score in the 99th percentile on the GMAT
725 is the 99th percentile on the GMAT Focus Edition. What the top 1% do differently, a ten-week plan, and why quant candidates lose points on Verbal.
Read the GMAT piece → BIs an MBA worth it?
The real cost, what graduates earn, the break-even arithmetic, and the cases where it clearly pays and where it clearly does not, for people in finance and tech.
Read the MBA value piece → BWhy I chose London Business School
Why a quant chose LBS for an MBA, what the programme is like, what it costs, and what I look for now that I interview LBS applicants.
Read the LBS piece →Technical
A quant interview study plan: eight weeks to the final round
Probability, mental maths, brainteasers, markets and code, week by week, with a bar to clear before you move on and the practice to clear it with.
Read the plan → AWhy I wrote 554 practice questions and gave them away
Why the bank is this large, where the questions came from, why the solutions are longer than the questions, and the three I had to pull after publishing them.
Read it → AQuant interview questions, with worked solutions
Expected value, gambler's ruin, conditioning, market making and mental maths: five question types, each solved the way an interviewer wants to hear it.
Read the worked questions → AWhat a quant interview is actually testing
The mathematics is the entry ticket. What decides the outcome is the ninety seconds after you realise you have no answer, and the stochastic calculus you can safely ignore.
Read the quant interview piece → CReading a MAT question the way an examiner does
Why students with perfect school marks come out of MAT mocks in the forties, and why the reflex that made them successful is the thing working against them.
Read the Oxford admissions piece → A209 quant interview questions, with answers
Probability, brainteasers, stochastic calculus, statistics and ML, market making and mental maths. Browse by topic or take a timed quiz.
Open the question bank →On the wider question
What people are buying when they buy an MBA
Two hundred thousand pounds and two years. What that money actually purchases, which is not what the brochures say and not what the cynics say either.
Read the MBA piece → ·The night shift and the problem set
On the students who work while they study, what those hours cost them, and why I have learned to bet on the tired ones.
Read the night shift piece → ·Decision day — a poem
For anyone refreshing an inbox at one in the morning in January. Written in Poe's metre, which fitted the subject better than it had any right to.
Read the poem →A problem every week
Pick a subject and you get one problem a week with a full worked solution. Real questions of the kind that decide these things, not warm-ups. Free, and one email a week with nothing else in it.