Think out loud
Definition · Level 11 · Interview practice
Keep reading with Tradecraft
You’ve read your 3 free definitions this month. Tradecraft explains all 738 terms and strategies, with the lessons that teach them, flashcards that come back before you forget, quizzes and a payoff lab.
Narrate your method on anything that takes more than a second or two, so silence never reads as a freeze and the interviewer can follow — and steer — your reasoning.
Example
“17 × 25 is 425, minus 17… 408.”
Where Tradecraft teaches it
Level 11 · Interview practice, in the lesson “Interview habits: answering under time pressure”: What trading interviewers are really testing, and the answer habits that hold up under time pressure.
Related terms
- Answer firstInterview habit: say the number or verdict in the first breath, then a one-line justification — never make the interviewer sit through the…
- “I don't know, but…”The honest alternative to bluffing: admit the gap in one breath, then show how you would reason toward an answer.
- State your assumptionsWhen a detail is missing, say the natural reading aloud and carry on rather than asking and waiting; the interviewer will correct you if they meant…
- √2, √3 and e≈ 1.414, ≈ 1.732 and ≈ 2.718. With independent returns, vol over two or three periods is one-period vol times the first or the second; the last is…
- √252≈ 15.87 — the factor between daily and annual volatility on trading days: annual σ = daily σ × 15.87.
- √365≈ 19.1 — the calendar-day annualisation factor, for markets that trade every day (crypto) or quantities measured over all days of the year, weekends…