Market Data & Intervals

Bloomberg sells market data, and some of its coding prompts borrow the vocabulary: trades against stock symbols, a price series looked at a few days at a time, and banks with opening hours. None of them needs finance knowledge. The ticker is a hash map with a ranked structure beside it, the same shape as in Data Structure Design. The price range is a sliding window that never changes width, and trading hours is interval merging with a containment test at the end. Most of the pressure is on the second answer. A careful first version is often met with "can you do better?", and the cheaper version depends on the workload. Trades usually arrive far more often than anyone asks for the leaders, and a trading day has only 24 hours, so an array of hour slots can replace the sort. Ask about the data before you choose a structure, and give the cost of each function separately. The plain interval problems, room scheduling and range merging, come after the market ones. They look alike, so state your endpoint rule before you code. Interviewers often ask whether a meeting ending at ten clashes with one starting at ten.

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