8 Point72 SQL Interview Questions (Updated 2024)

Updated on

August 11, 2024

Data Science, Data Engineering, and Data Analytics employees at Point72 uses SQL to analyze large financial datasets, including stock prices, trading volumes, and market sentiment, to identify trends and patterns that inform trading strategies. It is also used to manage large databases, such as those containing portfolio performance and risk metrics, for optimal information retrieval, which is why Point72 asks SQL questions during job interviews.

As such, to help you ace the Point72 SQL interview, we've curated 8 Point72 SQL interview questions – scroll down to start solving them!

Point72 SQL Interview Questions

8 Point72 SQL Interview Questions

SQL Question 1: Identifying High-Performance Clients

Point72 wants to identify its most valuable clients, Given the table that tracks the number of trades, and the from each trade, write a SQL query to return the top 5 clients with the highest total profit in the last 12 months.

Sample data:

Table Input:
trade_idclient_idtrade_dateprofit
220356115/10/20215000
430115210/11/20214000
150134805/01/20225500
982356125/06/20226500
840256115/08/20226000
345634805/09/20213000

Answer:


This SQL solution first filters the trades that took place in the last twelve months. Then it groups trades by client_id and calculates the total profit for each client. Finally, it orders the results in descending order of total profit and returns the top 5 clients.

To work on a similar customer analytics SQL question where you can solve it interactively and have your SQL solution automatically checked, try this Walmart SQL Interview Question: Walmart SQL Interview Question

SQL Question 2: Department Salaries

You're given a table of Point72 employee and department salary data. Write a SQL query to find departments where the departments average salary is higher than the company's average salary.

You can solve this question directly within the browser on DataLemur:

Department vs. Company Salary

The answer is LONG – 30+ lines of SQL. You can find a detailed solution here: Department Salaries.

SQL Question 3: What's a constraint in SQL, and do you have any examples?

Constraints are just rules your DBMS has to follow when updating/inserting/deleting data.

Say you had a table of Point72 products and a table of Point72 customers. Here's some example SQL constraints you'd use:

NOT NULL: This constraint could be used to ensure that certain columns in the product and customer tables, such as the product name and customer email address, cannot contain NULL values.

UNIQUE: This constraint could be used to ensure that the product IDs and customer IDs are unique. This would prevent duplicate entries in the respective tables.

PRIMARY KEY: This constraint could be used to combine the NOT NULL and UNIQUE constraints to create a primary key for each table. The product ID or customer ID could serve as the primary key.

FOREIGN KEY: This constraint could be used to establish relationships between the Point72 product and customer tables. For example, you could use a foreign key to link the customer ID in the customer table to the customer ID in the product table to track which products each customer has purchased.

CHECK: This constraint could be used to ensure that certain data meets specific conditions. For example, you could use a CHECK constraint to ensure that Point72 product prices are always positive numbers.

DEFAULT: This constraint could be used to specify default values for certain columns. For example, you could use a DEFAULT constraint to set the customer registration date to the current date if no value is provided when a new customer is added to the database.

Point72 SQL Interview Questions

SQL Question 4: Analyze Monthly Average Trade Volume

As an analyst at Point72, you have access to an extensive financial transaction database. One key metric often reviewed in the company is the monthly average trade volume for each security. You are tasked to write a SQL query that will calculate the monthly average trade volume for each security in the 'transactions' table.

Example Input:
transaction_idsecurity_idtrade_datevolume
1234SPY01/10/2022 00:00:005000
1567AAPL01/11/2022 00:00:009500
1842AAPL01/15/2022 00:00:003000
7421TSLA02/21/2022 00:00:0012000
5917SPY02/25/2022 00:00:005500
4157TSLA01/27/2022 00:00:0018000

Answer:


With this query, we first group the data by security and the month of the trade date (). We then calculate the average volume of this partition using the function. The result is a table reporting the monthly average trade volume for each security.

Example Output:

mthsecurityavg_volume
1AAPL6250
1SPY5000
1TSLA18000
2SPY5500
2TSLA12000

To practice a similar window function question on DataLemur's free interactive SQL code editor, try this Google SQL Interview Question: Google SQL Interview Question

SQL Question 5: Could you explain what a self-join is?

A self-join is a operation in which a single table is joined to itself. To perform a self-join, you must specify the table name twice in the clause, giving each instance a different alias. You can then join the two instances of the table using a clause, and specify the relationship between the rows in a clause.

Think of using a self-joins whenever your data analysis involves analyzie pairs of the same things, like comparing the salaries of employees within the same department, or identifying pairs of products that are frequently purchased together (which you can do in this real SQL question from a Walmart interview).

For another self-join example, suppose you were conducting an HR analytics project and needed to examine how frequently employees within the same department at Point72 interact with one another, you could use a self-join query like the following to retrieve all pairs of Point72 employees who work in the same department:


This query returns all pairs of Point72 employees who work in the same department, and excludes pairs where the employee's id is the same (since this would represent the same Point72 employee being paired with themselves).

SQL Question 6: Filter Customer Transactions by Amount and Date

Point72 has a database of all customer transactions. The transactions table records the customer id, transaction date, transaction amount, and product id for each transaction.

Write an SQL query to filter down this transactions data to only include records where the transaction amount is more than $1,000 and the transaction took place in the year 2022.

Use the provided sample tables to test your query.

Sample Input:
transaction_idcustomer_idtransaction_dateamountproduct_id
166501/03/2022 00:00:001500201
243206/09/2021 00:00:002000202
377204/11/2022 00:00:00500203
423207/22/2022 00:00:002000204
599408/05/2022 00:00:00500205
Expected Output:
transaction_idcustomer_idtransaction_dateamountproduct_id
166501/03/2022 00:00:001500201
423207/22/2022 00:00:002000204

Answer:


This query first filters the transactions table for rows where the transaction amount is more than $1,000. It then further filters those records to include only the ones where the transaction date is in the year 2022.

SQL Question 7: How do you select records without duplicates from a table?

"The clause in SQL allows you to select records that are unique, eliminating duplicates.

For a tangible example, say you had a table of Point72 employees:

first_namejob_title
AkashData Analyst
BrittanyData Scientist
CarlosData Engineer
DiegoData Engineer
EvaData Analyst

If you were doing an HR Analytics project and you wanted to get all the unique job titles that currently worked at the company, you would write the following SQL query:


The output would give you 3 distinct job titles at Point72:

job_title
Data Analyst
Data Scientist
Data Engineer

SQL Question 8: Calculate the average trading volume per stock for Point72

As a financial company, Point72 deals with multiple stocks. Your task is to find the average trading volume for each stock.

Example Input:
trade_idtrade_datestock_idtraded_volume
1012022-07-01S015000
1022022-07-02S013000
1032022-07-03S024500
1042022-07-04S024000
1052022-07-05S015500
1062022-07-06S024200
Example Output:
stockavg_trading_volume
S014500
S024233.33

Answer:


With this query, we group by the and then calculate the average trading for each . These will allow us to get the desired result, which is the average trading volume for each stock. Please note that the output for the average is truncated for readability.

To practice a very similar question try this interactive Robinhood Cities With Completed Trades Question which is similar for requiring querying trade data or this Stripe Repeated Payments Question which is similar for needing aggregated analysis of transaction data.

How To Prepare for the Point72 SQL Interview

The best way to prepare for a Point72 SQL interview is to practice, practice, practice. Besides solving the above Point72 SQL interview questions, you should also solve the 200+ DataLemur interview questions which come from companies like FAANG tech companies and tech startups.

DataLemur SQL Interview Questions

Each interview question has hints to guide you, fully explained answers along with a discussion board to see how others solved it and best of all, there's an online SQL code editor so you can easily right in the browser your SQL query answer and have it checked.

To prep for the Point72 SQL interview it is also helpful to practice SQL problems from other finance companies like:

Dive into the world of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning with Point72's expert insights and innovative approaches!

In case your SQL coding skills are weak, don't worry about going right into solving questions – improve your SQL foundations with this free SQL for Data Analytics course.

Free SQL tutorial

This tutorial covers things like HAVING and filtering data with boolean operators – both of which come up routinely during Point72 SQL assessments.

Point72 Data Science Interview Tips

What Do Point72 Data Science Interviews Cover?

In addition to SQL query questions, the other types of questions to prepare for the Point72 Data Science Interview are:

  • Statistics and Probability Questions
  • Python or R Coding Questions
  • Analytics and Product-Metrics Questions
  • ML Modelling Questions
  • Behavioral Interview Questions focussed on Point72 culture and values

Point72 Data Scientist

How To Prepare for Point72 Data Science Interviews?

To prepare for Point72 Data Science interviews read the book Ace the Data Science Interview because it's got:

  • 201 interview questions sourced from FAANG & startups
  • a crash course covering SQL, Product-Sense & ML
  • over 1000+ reviews on Amazon & 4.5-star rating

Ace the Data Science Interview by Nick Singh Kevin Huo

Don't forget about the behavioral interview – prepare for that with this guide on behavioral interview questions.

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