Hey, anyone else out there give Swaps the old college try and then figure it wasn’t worth it? It seems like it would take a massive effort for my little brain to figure it out, so I’ll move along and get my expected 33% of a point when it comes up.
lol, yup. not killing myself for a point or two. I know the (1-Zn/sum of Zs) formula and thats good enough. Worst part is, I gave like 5+ hours to swaps back in my first pass and now come review time I realize that that formula was apparently my only take away. lol
I think I finally got the hang of it…but man was I close to giving up.
If there’s a question like the EUR-PLN one on the CFAI Mock, I think that even if you know what you’re doing, it’ll take bloody forever to get the right answer.
i felt the same but these are guarunteed marks for me now. Just stick with it a bit.
Interesting you say that because I was wondering the same thing myself. I definitely did that for Level 1, because there was so many different topics and questions and each question was only 1 out of 240, I knew I could afford to do that. With the vignette format, I am concerned with doing that because missing an entire vignette would be deadly. However, I feel like the effort that would go into figuring out the swap calcs, whereas on the exam it would take up precious time and I still may get it wrong, may not be worth it.
Just remember swaptions
I think they have a whole item set on Swaps up their sleeves. At least thats what my nightmares tell me…
Y’all realize that CFA Institute monitors this and other chat fora looking for the areas people say they’re going to ignore, yes?
They have item sets on everything, and pick the ones that y’all say you’re going to abandon.
Or so I’ve heard.
I think the exam is all swaps.
For ethics:
John Smith, CFA calculates an option swap given the following criteria (whole page worth of notes). John Smith notes that it would be advantages to have the value equal 13.458% as this would be good for his client. After the calculation, John Smith reports the final value as 13.458% Is John being ethical?
a) No, because the actual value is 12.991%.
b) No, because the actual value is 13.829%
c) No, because the actual value is 8.435%
At that point, I quietly get up from my desk and leave.
My biggest fear is an exam where every answer was A. Oh lord, please please don’t let that be the case.
I haven’t understood it and I’m really short on time to properly understand it now. But, I’m still considering doing it because of two reasons:
One, they say generally when a particular topic is very hard, the questions tend to be relatively easier. So, even if I sort of get an overview of the reading, I might be able to answer around 50% of the questions correctly.
Two, at L2 each question is worth double the points as compared to L1. On top of that, we have the vignette format. So, it could totally be the difference between pass and fail if you’re on the borderline.
I thought I knew swaps inside out until i did the CFAI pm. totally threw me off the rest of the paper as well, was trying to make time from that point on.
Yea man, I feel you. I actually worked backwards through the CFAI mock, as I like to start with Equity because I feel it’s a strong point, and this was a baaaaaad idea. I was really tight on time for the derivatives item set.
Worried even before attempting 2013 mock
Will surely tighten SWAPS and Portfolio
Well . . . now you’ve gone and done it.
Elan shd come out with a video on swaps .
It will be very popular 
This sounds like a bad idea to me…Swaps are a huge topic in LII, and you could theoretically get 2 item sets on derivatives, both based on swaps. Thats a lot of points to give up. IMHO its worth the effort to understand them.
I’m bailing on currnecy swaps…fuck that
There are four main readings in derivatives and there are going to be two who vignettes on derivatives on the test.
You don’t have 4 hours to give to a reading that is worth at least 3 questions on the test?