Top 3 Corporate actions Interview Questions

Browse 3 real-world technical and behavioral interview questions about Corporate actions. Review scenarios, edge cases, and architectural best practices.

A corporate action is confirmed with an effective date in the past, after you have already struck positions and sent statements. How does your system cope?

By storing when something became true separately from when you learned it, so the old report stays reproducible while the corrected position takes effect from the event date. The engineering work is in the fan-out to everything already derived from the wrong quantity, not in the entitlement posting itself.

harddesign

A client says your position does not match their custodian statement. How do you work out who is right, and what does a corporate action do to that answer?

A position is what you have traded, a holding is what the custodian says you own, and they legitimately differ by unsettled trades and pending entitlements. Reconciliation compares both against the custodian's statements, and corporate actions break it when an election deadline is missed. Use this custody answer to show the decision, trade-off, and evidence rather than a memorised definition.

mediumscenario

A researcher's backtest and the desk's live profit and loss disagree about the same stock's price history. Where do you look first?

Establish that both are talking about the same instrument, then about the same series. Adjusted histories are rewritten by every subsequent corporate action, tickers get reused, official closing prices are not last trades, and the currency conversion is a second series with all the same problems.

hardscenario