can be EXTREMELY boring if ur like me and could care less about mortgages.
and long tooo. its taken me 2 hours to read this b/c my mind keeps wandering.
just a heads up guys, they do test this material in detail on the test (at least they did last june). i was kind of surprised, but there were 2-3 DETAILED questions about asset and mortgage backed securities. i expected something fairly easy along those lines but was surprised by how hard the question was – something about two funky securities (one was a HEL and the other, i think, was a securitized credit card instrument) and it was a higher / lower two part kind of question. if you didn’t know the details about BOTH securities, you might not have gotten the question right. you have to know EVERYTHING about these to be safe on test day. that being said, i do think fixed income is one of the easiest ways to pad your score on test day since the material is not that hard and accounts for like 10% of the exam.
I can only confirm what asdffdsa has said…I totally underestimated FI and I think that cost me the exam more than anything else. In retrospective, however, I’m not even mad at CFAI for putting a fairly large amount of detailed MBS/CMO/ABS questions on the exam. Because in the end they were right on “diligently” testing that subject, if you take a look at what has unfolded with the whole subprime/CDO issue AFTER the exam. People have to get a better understanding of these instruments and their valuation! I didn’t, so I guess failing was a fair deal. I will take my 2nd try as an opportunity to accumulate at least a decent know how on this whole thing. Having said that, I honestly cannot reject the fact that it is something which does not bring out the biggest excitement in me…and that’s at <1% significance level.