Alternative Investments and Derivatives

I am just about finished with Book 5 of CFA Curriculum, and was going to try and finish Book 6 (Alternative Investments and Derivatives) by the end of October. This would leave 1 month for review, QBank, Practice Tests, etc. I am pretty shaky in some areas though that are important, and was wondering: Should I skip AI and derivatives and start my review now, and hopefully picking up enough in the QBank and Secret Sauce to get by? Just looking for some input, thanks.

If you don’t have any prior background, you might find derivatives hard and time-consuming. Alt Inv though, you don’t want to skip, because they’re easy and have the same weight on the exam as derivatives do. So I’d say definitely study Alt Inv and get those easy points. If you have Schweser, read AI there. You can knock it off in a couple of hours tops (it’s probably ~15 pages), and the coverage in Schweser is more than sufficient from what I’ve heard from people who have written the exam. good luck.

I just finished derivatives and alternative investments. Like lola said, AI is easy and no reason to skip it. As for derivatives, the math and derivation of the lower and upper bounds and put-call parity can be a bit confusing, but I don’t think it was that challenging to understand the overall concepts behind futures, forwards, swaps or options. It will really only take a few hours to look over the schweser notes…at least give you some background info.

And if you don’t get it now - you will be smoked on LII and LIII. How can anyone be a finance professional and not know about a market that is at least 50 times larger than equity markets?

AI is too easy to skip.