Other than the standard read the CFA text, do the CFA text questions and do the Q-bank questions, anyone have any other insight into understanding Swaps? Is anyone else getting smoked by them? This is the one piece of the derivative curriculum that is giving me the most problems (and it most likely will be on the exam come June). Thanks.
I personally found Hull’s textbook Futures, Options and Other Derivatives to explain the concept in a more straight forward manner than the CFAI texts.
They totally suck. I worked on them for about 2.5 hours last night and came away with nothing. I started back up about 2 hours and slowly starting to grasp them. I’ve been building Excel spreadsheets that price and value them. I’d recommend it. It’s really helping.
I find that Excel is helpful, but you still need to be able to do them by hand come exam time.