Blotter Validation & Data-Cleaning
Spot the bad rows in a messy trade blotter, compute the clean totals, and know the rules the attention-to-detail ops test in depth.
The scenario
It's minutes before cut-off and the overnight blotter is dirty. Booking errors, a missing SSI, a stale price, a duplicate all hiding in plain sight. Your job is to catch every bad row without over-flagging the clean ones, then report the corrected numbers. Precision is the whole game.
Where this shows up
Blotter validation and data-cleaning flag the invalid rows, reconcile the corrected totals, cross-reference to the security master is the classic attention-to-detail ops take-home, and Jane Street's ops exercise is explicitly about catching what others miss.
Firms such as Jane Street, Goldman Sachs, Citi.
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The drill
Question 1 lists the full 8-row blotter read it carefully; the later questions refer back to those rows by number. Numeric answers are graded to a small tolerance.
Sample question
Today's blotter (trade date 01 Jul for all rows). Select every row that fails data-quality validation.
Included with the Trading Ops pack
The full graded drill is part of the Trading Operations & Middle Office pack a one-time purchase unlocks every concept, coding guide, interview playbook and take-home in this track.
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