Five Rings LINK Programme Guide

What Is the Five Rings LINK Programme?

LINK, the Five Rings Software Development Intensive Program, introduces university sophomores to engineering inside a proprietary trading firm. It is a short educational experience built around technical workshops, mentorship and meeting the people who develop trading infrastructure.

Five Rings builds software that connects to exchanges, processes market information and supports the trading strategies used by its traders and quantitative researchers. LINK gives students an early view of the engineering behind those systems, especially the challenge of making software both fast and dependable.

The most useful reason to apply is curiosity about the systems that make electronic markets work. If you enjoy understanding what happens between receiving a message and executing a reliable action, the workshop is a strong match.

Who Can Apply to Five Rings LINK?

The current LINK programme targets students in their second year of university, also called sophomores. Its curriculum is focused on software development, so applicants should be interested in programming, operating systems and the practical challenges of building reliable technology.

A strong application can come from coursework, a personal project, a research project or a student engineering team. A useful example is software that handles data, manages state, communicates over a network or solves a performance problem, even if the project has nothing to do with finance.

• Study stage: Be in your second year when applying to the relevant programme intake.
• Technical interests: Be ready to explain why C++, Python, Linux or systems programming appeals to you.
• Academic record: Have a recent transcript showing your name and university, along with an accurate grade scale.
• Attendance: Be able to commit to an entire New York session, taking your academic calendar and travel arrangements into account.

The application asks about eligibility to work in the United States and future visa sponsorship needs. Answer those questions accurately, particularly if you study outside the United States, and resolve any travel eligibility questions with the recruiting team before committing to a session.

When and Where Does LINK Take Place?

LINK takes place at Five Rings headquarters in Brookfield Place, New York City. The currently listed intake has three separate five day sessions, with students applying to the programme once rather than submitting an application for every session.

Check your examination dates, term start and travel commitments before choosing sessions. For new intakes, use the Five Rings careers page to check the active LINK opening and its session dates.

How to Apply for Five Rings LINK

Apply through the Five Rings LINK application and submit a CV together with your most recent academic transcript. The form also collects education details, grades, preferred programme sessions and practical recruiting information.

1. Prepare a focused CV

   Put your degree, study stage and strongest technical projects where they are easy to find. For each project, describe what you built, the tools you used and one problem you solved through design, debugging or testing.

2. Upload your academic record

   Use a current transcript showing your full name and institution. Enter grades using your university's actual grading scale so the reader can interpret the result correctly.

3. Complete the application questions

   Enter your institution, degree, discipline and study dates, then select your department of interest and available LINK sessions. The form also asks about recent experience, competing offers, work eligibility and sponsorship requirements.

4. Submit and prepare to explain your work

   Check the contact information before submitting and keep a copy of your CV and project notes. If Five Rings contacts you about the next step, be ready to discuss why you want to learn how trading systems are designed.

What makes a useful project description?

Replace a vague line such as “Built a trading app in Python” with the specific engineering problem you tackled. For example, explain that your program received price updates, maintained a current state, detected invalid messages and tested how the system recovered from an interruption, if those are things you actually implemented.

If your strongest project is unrelated to finance, use it. The relevant signal is whether you understand your own code and can explain the choices behind it.

How to Prepare for LINK Selection

Your CV, transcript and application answers are the starting point for LINK selection. Prepare a clear account of one technical project and refresh your programming fundamentals so you can respond confidently to any follow up from the software development team.

LINK focuses on engineering rather than the quantitative trader recruitment track. Your preparation should therefore favour coding, debugging, system behaviour and technical communication over trading brainteasers or mental arithmetic drills.

As an EverythingQuant practice benchmark, give yourself five minutes to present a project, ten minutes to answer design questions and thirty minutes to solve a small stream processing problem. Review the solution for correctness and edge cases before worrying about speed.

What Do Participants Learn During LINK?

The workshop explores how trading systems are designed and built in Five Rings' C++ and Python development environment on Linux. Full time software developers mentor participants through subjects that connect programming fundamentals to production trading infrastructure.

C++23 and Python on Linux

C++ is useful when a system needs precise control over memory, data layout and performance, while Python can support analysis, tooling and rapid experimentation. Review how to compile and run a small C++ program, work with vectors and references, and use Python to transform structured data.

Be comfortable navigating directories, inspecting files, running scripts and reading compiler or runtime errors in a Linux terminal. Understanding what your program is doing matters more than memorising obscure language features.

Network protocol stacks

Market data and orders travel through networks, where messages can arrive late, be duplicated or fail to arrive at all. Understand the basic roles of TCP and UDP, message framing, sequence numbers and how an application notices that its view of the market is incomplete.

For example, if your feed receives sequence numbers 41, 42 and 44, message 43 is missing. A safe processing system should recognise that gap rather than silently assume it has a complete sequence of events.

Distributed systems

A trading system contains multiple interacting components, often running on different machines. Learn to reason about how an event passes between services, what happens when a component restarts and how state is recovered after a failure.

Latency measures the delay before work is completed, while reliability measures whether the system behaves correctly under expected and unexpected conditions. Good engineering requires both, even when optimising one can make the other harder.

Automated trading system programming

Automated trading software turns incoming market information into decisions and then sends instructions to exchanges. A simplified system can be understood as a sequence of components, each with a specific responsibility.

1. Receive market information

   Read a message, check its format and confirm that it belongs in the expected sequence.

2. Update the system's state

   Maintain current prices, quantities and the information needed to make a decision.

3. Evaluate a proposed action

   Run strategy logic and checks that prevent invalid or unacceptable orders from being sent.

4. Send and monitor the order

   Communicate with an exchange, process acknowledgements and keep the internal view consistent with what actually happened.

This flow is a conceptual learning model, not a fixed LINK exercise. It gives you a framework for asking good questions about system boundaries, performance, failure recovery and correctness during the workshop.

Learning from the team

Participants work with Five Rings software developers and spend time with the wider team through meals and social activities. Bring thoughtful questions about how engineers test changes, investigate failures and collaborate with traders when software behaviour matters in live markets.

An Original Trading Systems Practice Exercise

Try this EverythingQuant exercise before attending LINK: process a stream of quote updates and stop when an expected message is missing. It combines Python, ordered events and basic trading terminology in a small problem you can complete and test yourself.

The task

Each update contains a sequence number, the best bid and the best ask, with prices stored as integer cents. The bid is the highest displayed buying price, the ask is the lowest displayed selling price, and the spread is the ask minus the bid.

For every valid update, print the spread. If the next sequence number is missing or the bid is at least as large as the ask, stop processing and raise the issue instead of accepting inconsistent market information.

updates = [
    (41, 10010, 10015),
    (42, 10012, 10016),
    (44, 10013, 10017),
]

previous = None

for sequence, bid, ask in updates:
    if previous is not None and sequence != previous + 1:
        print(f"Gap: expected {previous + 1}, got {sequence}")
        break

    if bid >= ask:
        raise ValueError("Invalid quote")

    print(f"Message {sequence}: spread {ask - bid} cents")
    previous = sequence

Message 41: spread 5 cents
Message 42: spread 4 cents
Gap: expected 43, got 44

Make the exercise more realistic

• Reject duplicate or old sequence numbers and test what happens after the first gap.
• Replace the sample list with a line by line file reader or a mock socket feed.
• Record processing time, then explain which measurements would help identify latency spikes.
• Reimplement the core loop in C++ using a small struct and a vector of updates.

The simple stream loop takes time proportional to the number of messages it processes and needs constant extra memory beyond its input. The harder design question is what to do after the gap: pause, recover missing data and rebuild a trustworthy state before resuming.

Stipend, Travel and Accommodation

For the currently listed LINK intake, selected participants receive a $2,000 stipend, travel coverage to and from New York, and housing accommodation. Five Rings also provides breakfast and lunch during the programme, along with social activities involving its team.

These benefits make it practical for students to attend an intensive week away from university. They are programme benefits rather than an internship salary, and the details attached to an individual invitation should guide your bookings.

A Practical Preparation Plan for LINK

Prepare for LINK by making yourself comfortable with the tools and concepts that appear in the workshop. You do not need an elaborate trading model; a working program you understand, a usable Linux environment and clear explanations will be more valuable.

The following ten day plan is an EverythingQuant preparation schedule. Each block should end with something you can run, test or explain without notes.

If you have limited time, prioritise a short Linux session, one working stream processor and a careful walkthrough of your strongest project. For structured coding practice, use EverythingQuant's Data Structures and Algorithms in Python course or its programming questions.

During the workshop, ask questions that connect theory to design decisions. For example: how does a service recover missing messages, where are order checks placed, and how do engineers test performance changes safely?

What Happens After LINK?

LINK gives participants experience learning directly from software developers at a trading firm, plus a clearer understanding of the work behind electronic markets. That can help you decide whether to pursue software development in quantitative trading and which skills to strengthen next.

LINK is separate from Five Rings' longer software developer internships and graduate roles. Attending the workshop does not create an automatic internship or job offer, so treat it as a learning opportunity and use future recruitment processes on their own terms.

After the programme, write down the engineering concepts you explored and build a small project that demonstrates one of them. A tested message processor, networked application or reliability experiment gives you something concrete to discuss in a future application.

Five Rings LINK Frequently Asked Questions

Official Application and Useful Resources

Use the Five Rings application for the active cohort, the careers page for current openings and the firm's engineering role descriptions to understand the work. These links are the most direct next steps once you have reviewed your eligibility and prepared your materials.