UBS: Equities sales and trading (summer internship)

Question

When have you shown leadership?

Answer:

Talked about working as a supervisor on the university bar. Gave some spiel about earning the trust and respect of my team and dealing with someone who was dissenting.

Question

What is 2.2&2?

Answer:

I verbalised my working out: 4.84.

Question

Talk to me about your portfolio of shares. When are you going to sell share x?

Answer:

Discussed why I held certain positions. I said I'd keep a track of the general macroeconomic changes, and whether I had too much exposure near a peak in the FTSE. Then talked about trying to pre-empt any big changes that the company was making and how I felt this would affect their share price. Just needed to show that I hadn't just plucked these positions out of thin air.

Question

There are ten bottles of pills. 9 have good pills in them, weighing 10g each and 1 bottle has bad pills weighing 9g each. For arguments sake there are an infinite number of pills in each bottle. You also have a set of electric weighing scales and you are only allowed one 'weigh'

How do you find out which bottle has the bad pills in?

(You have to have one combination of pills to find the answer, so you can't put a bunch on the scales and then keep taking them off one by one to find the right answer)

Answer:

If you were to take 1 pill from each bottle and weigh them, you'd expect the weight to be (9x10)+(1x9)= 99g.

If you were to take 10 pills from each bottle and weigh them you'd expect the weight to be (9x100)+(1x90)= 990g.

If you take 1 pill from bottle 1, 2 pills from bottle 2, 3 pills from bottle 3 etc., and all of the pills were equal to 10g then the expected total weight to be 550g. Whatever the weight below 550g is (say the total weight is 546g) then this means that there are 4 pills weighing 9g, meaning that the bad pills were in bottle 4.

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