Taking FRM Part 2 in November and they’re slated to publish in July. Any one have any experience with the Part 1 Wiley material? I had Schweser and Bionic Turtle for Part 1. I actually wasn’t too fond of BT’s practice questions or notes except for its 150-page secret sauce style review notes. For Part 1 in Nov 2015, Schweser seemed to match up nicely on exam difficulty, but there seems to be large deviations of difficulty (or perceptions of difficulty), and many test takers finding Schweser too easy and BT just right, etc. Wondering if Wiley so far is any good, otherwise I’ll resign myself to BT and suck up the buyer’s remorse.
I’d be very interested to hear anyone’s experience with the Christian Cooper Wiley material too…Wondering if I should go the BT route again or try Wiley’s offering.
Hi,
do any of you have a vague idea on when the Wiley material for part 2 is going to be released? July is a pretty vague term and the time is definitely running out. I used Schweser and BT for Part 1 last November but found the first a bit “easy” and totally dislike the BT format (with the exception of the questions, which were definitely worthy). I think that Wiley material could be the right in-between solution but honestly I don’t know if I want to wait till July to start preparing for the exam.
Hi, if any of you is interested, I just got a reply from Wiley Efficient Learning customer service that the released date has been (again) postponed to the end of August. This is definitely a deal breaker for me. What do you think?
Hi All,
I understand that it may be frustating to wait for the material to come, but honestly I think that it will be worth the wait. I would rather study from something that is very targetted and focussed rather than trying to study everything and not know what should be my focus for the exam. You need to understand that the FRM syllabus is very very vast and if someone can provide that material in a concentrated form and still not missing the soul of FRM , nothing can beat that…
The questions and solutions by Christian Cooper are simply brilliant…
I came aross a couple of questions/answers posted by Christian. I am sharing a small sample… Let know when do you think about this…
- junior analyst is reviewing credit decision rule and you want to spot check
their understand of the relative impact of bad credit decision. You describe a
scenario where there are only two states of the world, good firms and bad firms,
and either the firm is classified correctly or not, leading to 4 potential states of
the world. What type of decision rule does this describe?
A. Minimax Decision Rule
B. Neyman-Pearson Rule
C. Baysian decision tree
D. Reject-rate rule.
Answer: B
The Neyman-Pearson focuses on the impact of type I and type II
errors and that means a good company classified correctly or not and
vice versa for bad companies. In this case, a Type I error is
damaging to the bank because a loan is actually extended to a
defaulting bad firm where a type II error would mean credit was not
extended to a non-defaulting bad firm ( missed opportunity but not a
credit loss)
The others are all real decisions types we will get to later in the notes
and other practice questions.
Learning
- During a risk committee meeting, there is a debate around the impact of type I
and type II errors in the credit scoring models used by the bank. The problem
arises between two different outcomes: when the bank makes a bad loan to a
customer they thought were good or when the bank misses an opportunity to
loan to a customer that was good but the model said was bad. What is one of
the problems of this type of performance measure in the credit modeling?
A. This type of measure is a pure trade off between the type I
and type II errors
B. This measure of performance will work well when the
relative classification of credit risks is correctly modeled.
C. Since these credit classes are symmetric (not skewed) there
isn’t an asymmetric outcome between the type I and type II
events
D. This type of classification can be deficient where asymmetric
payoffs matter.
Answer: B
One thing you should expect on the exam is a lot of material from
other sections that seem like it could apply but you aren’t 100% sure.
That is why this test is so difficult. For example, answer choice D
applies to a completely different part of the reading and concerns the
maximum likelihood decision rule. It is the correct problem for that
question but not a question about whether we have classified a credit
risk properly. Answer A is true statement about this type of
performance measure but isn’t a drawback. Answer C is opposite,
these credit types are very skewed ( very few defaults out of the total
population of customers) so this is a distractor that sounds right but
is actually opposite: the risks are very asymmetric and skewed and
there is asymmetric outcomes between type I and type II.
- When considering the choice of a model for credit risks, what is not a typical
factor to consider?
A. Performance
B. Data Availability
C. Class discriminability
D. Calibration constraints
Answer: C
A, B, and D are all factors that sould be considered when chosing a
model. For answer choice C, discriminability refers to the capacity
to classify unseen data. It appears in the text but is unrelated to this
question. Be prepared for answer choices to “sound” familiar
because GARP will pull unrelated terms from the same readings as a
way to throw you off. Always go with your first instinct if you are
really guessing on a coin toss between which answer to pick.
Just posting these three questions for now… Let me know what do you guys think… Will post more questions if I find them…
Trust me GARP is mean… they leave no stone unturned to throw you completely off gaurd during the exam… And I would love to find a course that teaches me to think the way GARP wants us to think…
A couple of my colleagues from China swear by Christian Cooper’s study material…
Thanks…
Kavita
I am happy to hear that, but my question to Customer Service was quite clear and purely on the availability date for the Notes, which I intended to use as primary material to prepare. This was what I thought of purchasing first, followed by the practice questions. I wasn’t even considering the videos.
I can wait till the end of June, first week of July at most, but I wouldn’t like to wait more than that. I have a family with kid and a full time job, so starting early for me is a must…
Hi @ChristianHCooper. I totally understand the mistake. So do you have an indicative timeline for the release of the Notes? are we talkin about end of june? mid july? end of July?
Sorry if I seem to press you on that but time is quite key here…
Let me double check with warehouse just to be sure but I am told mid-july.
I think that mid july could work for my schedule. Can you please confirm me that once you’re more sure?
Many thanks
Yep, mid july is still the schedule.
HI Christian,
Thanks so much… Eagerly waiting for your material to come… I have heard such great things about your study material…
Can’t wait to subscribe it…
Thanks and Regards,
Kavita
I just checked yesterday and got a response in few hours. Response goes like this
"Thank you for your email and fior your interest in our FRM products. Unfortunately, we don’t have an exact release date but, it will probably by the end of July. Thank you for your patience and if you have any further questions please email me back
Sincerely,
Vanessa Neely"
Im working on an exact date for you. As you might expect, this is an operational issue of physically moving books to different continents. I’ll post details as I have them.
thanks a lot for the update. We will be waiting to hear from you soon. I am seriously in favour of your videos for my preparation. Hope timeline doesn’t block my way.
Part II notes go live on July 15th, we have been printing since Friday. Glad you like the videos! The notes, video, questions combo is what I wish I had when I was studying. Glad you like them. Years of work has gone into planning them.
I’m really torn between using your material Christian, and using Bionic Turtle again.
to help me decide, are there any sample materials I can view anywhere to see the style of writing and question/video style?
Many thanks.
Of course. I’ll DM you.
Thanks, I’ll keep an eye out for the message 
The Wiley FRM Exam Review books are completely rubbish! First of all, they do not cover all the Learning Statements, if so, they are covered very briefly and in the words of the author (who makes recommendations what is likely to show up at the exam - these recommendations should definitely not be followed). Furthermore, no detailed information is given what’s mentioned in the original text books (Hull, Tuckman, Amenc, Dowd, Bodie etc.). The quantitative and product sections are extremely bad (inferior), there is no information how certain formulas are derived. Various sections give the impression that they have been hastily cobbled together (even spelling mistakes here and there) just to get the book printed in time.
Even Schweser does a much better job, but still by far can’t compete with BIONIC Turtle!
I think it is important to note that I - and I alone- write the entirety of the Wiley program. To say that all Learning objectives are not covered is materially false. I personally know that each are covered because I wrote them.
Further, there are 6 errata that are known in part I and shared with students. From my pen, there is a peer review and entire teams of editors in multiple time zones that review and edit all content. To say the process is rushed is also materially false.
For the video production I spend ~ 5 hours per recorded hour of lecture on editing and scripting. There is also an entire video production team in place to edit and produce best in class programs taken directly from my experience as head of derivatives trading.
Lastly, any mention of original textbooks is a waste of anyone’s time. At no time will you be asked what John Hull thinks about the binomial tree. It is fundamentally is immaterial. Look at the old exams, it’s not what you are going to see on the test day.
Anyone can DM me at anytime if they have any concerns.