The Sales and Trading Interview Guide Series – Understanding Greeks and Delta Hedging – Coming soon to an iPad near you…

Preparing for the quantitative portion of a sales and trading interview for a main street bank is a nightmare. Specially if the bank is an active derivative trader and wants it intake class of interns and full time analysts and associates to hit the Sales and Trading desk running.

While basic option concepts generally get covered quite well in the MBA curriculum, when it comes to option price sensitivities and Greeks, our understanding remains rudimentary and superficial. One reason is the focus on formulas and calculation rather than intuition and understanding. Most courses have run out of time when it comes to delta, gamma, vega, theta and rho and stop after a basic rudimentary coverage of the material.

There is a lot of good material available on basic quantitative and numerical techniques tested in a Sales and Trading interview. But when it comes to option price sensitivities or Greeks, available material generally looks like this.

As part of the work we do with customers and students, our Apple iPad iBooks team is working on two very interesting and exciting titles.

The first is the Sales and Trading Interview Guide – Understanding Greeks for Dummies. Using the interactive iBook template we will help you master your Greeks to such a level where future mention of delta, gamma, vega, theta and rho would no longer break you out in cold sweat and palpitations. The iBook will cover Greeks behavior across time, volatility, spot and strike prices using easy to understand language, graphs and self assessment quizes.

But it’s the second iPad iBook title that we are really excited about. Sales and Trading Interview Guide – Delta Hedging and other higher dimensions, will help you build your own delta hedging sheet in excel using Monte Carlo Simulation. Both iPads books will have options for purchasing supporting excel spread sheets that extend the concepts covered in the iBook.

Planned for release in mid September, the two books will increase our inventory of interactive iBook for iPad titles to 5. Please feel free to drop me a note if you would like to learn more about the release dates and table of content for both titles.