Tenured Instrument Management

Implementing a financial instrument selection algorithm

This is an easy coding problem that tests your ability to translate a multi-stage filtering and selection specification into clean, correct code. It's the kind of problem quant trading firms use to assess whether you can handle precise business logic without losing track of the constraints and control flow.

The problem asks you to build a tenor selection algorithm that sifts through a collection of financial instruments, applies several layers of conditional logic, and returns a ranked pair (or single instrument, or nothing). Success depends on careful parsing of the criteria, correct handling of multiple conditional branches, and deliberate attention to edge cases—expired instruments, missing settlement values, boundary conditions on days-to-expiration, and the ordering of results.

• Filtering and sorting with multiple constraints
• Conditional branching and early returns
• Handling optional return values (return one, two, or zero results)
• Data validation and boundary conditions