3 topics will be on the exam @ 95% confidence

CFA Level III
#1

Hi guys!

Unless i am suffering from overconfidence bias, i am highly confident that those 3 topics will have their fair share on the exam (will probably see them in the AM and PM sections):

  • Concentrated Single-Asset Positions

  • Asset Allocation

  • Currency Management: An Introduction

Those topics are either new or have had some major changes from last year… and for such are not well covered in the previous exams or the mocks (not even scwheser mocks seem to cover concentrated position well enough)…

so what i want to propose is that everyone of us here in the forum who goes through anything that he thinks is something that can be tested on these 3 topics, just put it here on this thread…

I don’t know what you think, but something we read here may save us some very precious points.

I start with the following, the 3 primary objectives of managing concentrated positions:

  1. reduce risk

  2. Create liquidity for spending needs and diversification

  3. Tax efficiency - minimizing/delaying taxes

#2

betting on topics is very risky business.

#3

  1. Ethics.

  2. GIPS.

  3. Managing Institutional Portfolios.

There it go - three readings that WILL be tested. Confidence: 99%. Beat that.

#4

I’ve heard that GIPS isn’t necessarily always tested.

#5

Yea - a few years ago it wasn’t anywhere on either section. A guy I work with keeps reminding me, since he completely skipped it in studying and it worked out. I think that’s VERY low probablitly though, especially having happened in the past few years.

OP - didn’t quite get the gist of the thread. You wanna discuss those three you cited, or you’re asking peeps to post topics they think are highly likely to be on there? I’ll add a few though:

Corner portfolios

Implementation shortfall

Investor biases

Currency hedging of a foreign bond position

#6

Is this true? Do new/renewed readings have a higher chance of being tested?

#7

my idea was to post tricks/lists/important stuff related to the 3 topics… so we can discuss/learn them…

#8

i am not betting on any topics… i am just saying that those topics will probably be on the exam and when they do they’re not gonna be easy… because there isn’t enough material to practice on them…

#9

I don’t know - nobody knows… but if you were CFAI, would you spend the time and energy and money rewriting concentrated position into a whole new chapter and then not test it seriously?

#10

They know that you are going to spend extra time studying the newly written chapter (for the reason you mention above). Therefore, they will test it lightly on the 2014 exam and overweight it on the next exam period, 2015, when candidates are over studying the new 2015 material. wink

#11

I don’t recall having ever seen a Level III exam that didn’t have a whacking big private wealth management question to start the morning session.

A continuation of that trend seems a safe bet.

#12

from experience of previous levels they don’t necessarily test new or rewritten topics, they probably have just as much chance of coming up as other main topics.

I usually make sure I know the new topics well though as Schweser are lazy and don’t cover them in the practice exams and they don’t know how the topics will be examined so the notes might not be as good as they could be.