I didn’t take statistics cource before so I don’t understand the part of statistic, i understand the time value of money and technical analysis but statistics its very hard and not understandable, so i need advice to understand thies part of book.
Hi Spearhead,
Try to first understand the worked examples in the curriculum and your study notes.
Naturally, you may need to give yourself a little bit of extra time if this is the first time you’re seeing content of this nature. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it is harder, just not familiar to you yet.
As you read through the worked examples, compare them against what the LOS (Learning Outcome Statements) require you to be able to do on the exam.
Post “specific” questions here on what you don’t understand.
This forum has a lot of knowledgable people who would be glad to help you.
Also, for certain statistics questions, once you understand the key concepts and their application, if all you get is a calculate type question, you can use your calculator to get the answers directly.
I’ve written 22 articles on Level I quantitative methods that may be of some help here; here’s the index: http://www.financialexamhelp123.com/level-i-quantitative-methods/
Full disclosure: as of April 25, I’ve started charging for access to the articles on my website.
hI…try reading stats of commerce graduate studies for topics like probability concepts…hypothesis testing is covered in MBA…so if u can get hold of some MBA stats books it can help.
Unfortunately, learning statistics with the CFAI’s material is like trying to learn English by reading Thomas Pynchon. The material jumps all over the place and goes into difficult subjects without a very sensible progression of ideas or establishing a baseline of knowledge which you can build on. If you have never been introduced to statistics at all, I would definitely say the CFAI material is not the place to learn it. Go pick up a 101 level textbook and take a day to read through the foundations of statistics. You can then revert to the CFAI texts to understand what they think is important for the test.
If you do want to try to power through the CFAI material, my advice would be to read and re-read Sections 3.2 and 3.3 in Reading 9 over and over until you understand dispersion of the normal distribution and how we know what percentages of observations will be in which standard deviations. Everything in statistics flows from that concept, so if you can get a strong internal understanding of what that is and how it makes sense, the Q-statistic will flow naturally. Once you have the Q down, you can start playing games with it, like the T statistic (with fewer obesrvations), the lognormal distribution, hypothesis testing, and skewness. They are all based on the distribution of the normal curve, so it is one concept that you cannot afford to skip or breeze over.