Am I the only one getting annoyed by the lack of disclosure around which info is “nice to know” and which is “needed to know”?
I’m about halfway through the liability-driven solutions video and I have no idea if what he’s saying is testable or not. He spent a ton of time explaining how to calculate Macaulay duration and then just said “they’ll give this to you on the exam though”.
Maybe I’m just irritated that this is so unnecessarily complex but I ended up just saying screw it and am going to focus on EOCs and BBs until the boot camp. Such a mind share suck to waste time on non-testable material.
Yup it definitely drags…but Marc does make some great points…in the video…just a bit long winded…if you think that was frustrating just wait till you go through your second review through the material using his focus guide…that guide is still using the 2018 books as a reference point.
The only thing i liked about lvlup was Focus Material because it gave me topic wise questions appeared in the AM section for last so many years .
Although Marc emphasizes on overlapping topics within curriculum which was impressive to hear but practically speaking i never jumped to see the same topic in other parts of curriculum while reading any chapter. May be in the past CFAI used to test any topic from anywhere in the curriculum but now it may not be the case.
Me too got board with unnecessary long explanation of topics in the videos which have low probability of showing up in the exam and just touching other topics including several BB examples which needs more time to explain.
But i relaized it within two months of purchase of videos and shifted to other video provider and passed in the first attempt.
I agree completely. I relied on his videos for fixed income- new last year and I got completely screwed up. At the end and in the exam, I was not able to answer any questions pertaining to fixed income at all. This year I have switched to other provider videos (IFT) which are to the point. Also his summaries are great for review.
I agree with you, I find it strange, that he says that you should know how to calculate IRR, convexity, dispersion and blah blah blah when to calculate the IRR you should need a spreadsheet and it would cost a lot of time.
What do you think about? Should we really know this formulas? (he says “oh yeah!”) I don’t think so…
Passed last year (2018) with my lowest marks in fixed income (and I work in fixed income LOL) so I can relate that a lot of the material is not applicable at all and is simply just “fluff”
I think it is wise to spend more time on the blue and white text examples than it is memorizing equations because at L3 they know you know how to plug it into an equation because that was tested at L1. I think at L3 they’re looking for more application and understanding on the concepts which is probably where Marc was going with.
I also think that it’s more important to know the concepts than just use the formula, but Marc was saying that we should know these formula (there is a white text example where dispersion, convexity,… are calculated).
I competently agree. All we have to know how to pick the portfolios not to calculate all these measures. It is better if you know how to calculate all of that but while doing that, we miss the main q which is how to see which portfolio is best for the objective given. Not to get lost in the calculations (i did that and lost valuable time)