Optiver interns need to pass an 88-question theory exam… Claude outperforms most of them
Getting an internship or graduate job at a major electronic trading firm is no easy feat. There are horror stories of obtuse brainteasers asked in job interviews, but some firms have their own unique challenges. Interns at Dutch trading house Optiver, for example, must also pass an expansive theory test.
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A recent post by Optiver, which pays up to $90k to its interns for just a few weeks of work, compared the performance of various different Claude models on its intern theory exam made up of 88 questions. It's not clear whether interns encounter this during the application process or during the internship itself; Optiver did not respond to a request for comment but we suspect the latter.
The test includes simple questions on mathematical theory or trading concepts, as well as more niche and complex questions, including how to make markets around elections or data releases.
The average intern scores just 61% on this exam according to a report released in April which analyzed the performance of older models on the same exam. Opus 4.8 scored upwards of 70%.
Getting a job at Optiver presumably comes down to more than just your final score. The report said that the two biggest problems LLMs encountered in the exam were "failing to incorporate new information after acting" and "struggling to reason more than one or two steps ahead." As electronic trading interns have told us in the past, this kind of thinking is perhaps the most important part of being a trader and you're continually assessed on this during the internship itself. Optiver said that, in the exam, these LLMs "rarely demonstrated the more nuanced aspects of how our traders think and make decisions."
AI won't be replacing Optiver interns anytime soon, it seems, but that doesn't mean the trading firm isn't interested in the technology. We reported in April that the firm is building out an independent AI lab, and it also has an applied AI team working on using the tech in a trading context. The experiment above was carried out by Quintin Brown, a graduate trader who joined in 2025 before transitioning into its applied AI team.
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