Market making games are becoming a standard feature in trading interviews, and for good reason. These games test a candidate’s ability to make decisions under pressure, manage risk, and adapt to dynamic market conditions—skills that are essential for trading roles. If you’re preparing for a trading interview, understanding why these games matter is just as crucial as knowing how to approach them.
In this blog, we’ll explore why trading firms incorporate market-making games into their hiring process and explore a variety of games you can practice to sharpen your skills and excel in your upcoming trading interviews.
Table of Contents
Market Making Games to Practice
Here is an overview of the market making games that you can practice on our platform.
Market of Cards – Group Game
In “Market of Cards”, players act as both market makers and market takers, dealing with a deck of normal playing cards. Designed for multiple players (the user and multiple AI agents), this game challenges players’ ability to predict, strategize, and make wise trading decisions based on limited information.
The scoring system assigns different values to red and black cards. The game offers endless strategic possibilities, where players bid and ask based on their cards’ values.
Make Me a Market! – Facts & Guesstimates
‘Make me a market!‘ – you must have heard about this specific type of market making game. Our simulator helps you prepare for this specific type of market making games, where the simulator takes the role of the interviewer.
This game offers an extensive library of over 75 market making scenarios, all to keep your training fresh and diverse. Of these 75 scenarios, 50 are about facts and 25 about guesstimates.
Cards Market Making Game
Participate in a card-based expected value game often encountered in trading interviews. Practice with the typical questions and scenarios you might face in your upcoming trading interview. In this game, you’ll be the market taker. The computer, “the interviewer”, will be the market maker.
Fruit Market Making Game
In our Fruit Market Making Game, you are playing as a market taker. Is the market quotes too high or too low? And watch out: there are events in this game that affect the market values! You need to be quick with your mental math skills for this game. The quicker you are, the more often you can profit while the mis-pricing lasts.
Why Trading Firms Use Market Making Games in Their Interview Process
In the high-stakes world of trading, success depends on more than just technical knowledge or a polished resume. Trading is about decision-making under pressure, understanding market dynamics, and reacting to incomplete information. These are qualities that are hard to gauge through traditional interviews or standardized tests. This is why trading firms are using market making games in their interview process: integrating these games into their interview process can offer an edge in identifying top talent. Here’s why.
Market making games thrust candidates into scenarios where they must make split-second decisions while balancing risk and reward. In these simulations, there are no perfect answers, only trade-offs. By observing how candidates adjust their bids, manage spreads, or respond to adverse price movements, firms get a window into how they might perform under the relentless pace of actual trading.
Traditional interviews might explore decision-making theoretically, but they rarely reveal how a person handles the cognitive load of simultaneous problem-solving, market analysis, and risk assessment. Games, by contrast, capture those dynamics in action.
Testing Emotional Resilience
Trading is an emotional rollercoaster. The best traders know how to stay calm in the face of unexpected losses or erratic market behavior. Market making games, often presented by real trader during in-person interviews, simulate these stressors by creating fast-moving, unpredictable conditions that mirror real markets. Candidates must maintain composure, avoid overreaction, and demonstrate mental toughness, all while keeping their strategy intact.
This kind of resilience can’t be assessed by asking, “How do you handle stress?” Watching someone in the hot seat provides far more insight into their temperament.
Assessing Market Intuition
Market intuition—an instinctive understanding of supply-demand dynamics, pricing anomalies, and market sentiment—is often what separates good traders from great ones. Market-making games can reveal whether a candidate has the knack for interpreting signals and adapting to shifting market conditions.
For example, if a candidate tightens their spreads aggressively during low volatility or pulls back quickly in high-risk situations, it may indicate a strong feel for the market’s rhythm. This kind of intuition is notoriously hard to measure on paper or in theoretical interviews.
Encouraging Creativity and Strategic Thinking
Market-making isn’t just about following formulas; it’s a dance between strategy and adaptability. During a market-making game, candidates must develop and adjust their strategies on the fly. Firms can evaluate how innovative their approaches are, whether they anticipate competitors’ moves, and how they manage the trade-off between volume and profitability.
These insights go beyond technical proficiency, uncovering whether a candidate has the strategic mindset to thrive in competitive trading environments.
Figgie – In-House Created Market Making Game by Jane Street
Jane Street launched an in-house created game that publicly accessible. The game is a card game that was invented at Jane Street in 2013. It was designed to simulate open-outcry commodities trading. Most of the skill in Figgie is in negotiating trades that benefit both the buyer and seller. Like in poker, your objective in Figgie is to make money over a series of rounds. Have a look at their tutorial.
