Apply for consideration.

Eligibility

Praeclaria admits advanced secondary students with quantitative aptitude and an interest in markets. Foundations is the entry point and is right for most applicants. Fellowship and Advanced Fellowship applicants are typically identified during Foundations, though direct admission is possible for students with demonstrable prior research.

What we look for

• clear writing,
• curiosity about markets,
• comfort with uncertainty,
• quantitative or analytical maturity,
• willingness to revise,
• the ability to distinguish evidence from speculation,
• seriousness about the work.

What we do not look for

• essays polished by someone other than the applicant,
• long extracurricular lists,
• generic enthusiasm for finance,
• claims of passion without the work to support them,
• recommendation letters used in place of the student's own thinking.

Process

• A five-hundred-word written response to one of the published prompts.
• A thirty-minute video conversation with a supervisor at the firm.
• (Optional) A short sample of prior quantitative or analytical work.

Test scores are read but not weighted heavily. Letters of recommendation are not considered. We respond to every application within ten business days of the conversation.

Timeline

Praeclaria admits a small number of students by application, and reviews applications as they arrive. Conversations are scheduled on a rolling basis, and a start date is arranged individually with each admitted student rather than set to a fixed term.

Working with the supervisor

The supervisor frames the question and reviews the work; the student does the writing and the modeling. Students use language models the way working analysts do — for code, for editing, for working through methods. The expectation is the same as at the firm: the student understands what they have written and what the model is doing.

Boundaries

Students work only with approved public-market or synthetic data. They do not access firm capital, live trading systems, confidential positions, client information, or restricted internal materials. The work provides institutional exposure while preserving appropriate boundaries for secondary students.

The prompts

Choose one of the two prompts below. Five hundred words. We read the writing and ask the student about it during the conversation.

Quantitative

Choose a single financial market, real or imagined, and identify a quantitative regularity in its behaviour that you find puzzling. Describe the regularity precisely enough that a reader could verify it. Propose two competing explanations, and a single observation that would distinguish between them.

Macroeconomic

Pick a single country and a single decade. Describe one structural change in the economy during that decade that, in your view, was not fully priced by markets at the time. State the evidence that supports your view, and the evidence that would undermine it.

Application form

The application below is sent directly to admissions. We confirm receipt by email.