So wait after reading some of this im confused. I felt basically everything on the exam was pretty fair and a lot of the stuff was ridiculously easy. They couldnt put the whole thing on a tee like thye did with some questions. They have to make some a challenege!
If mocks are of any meaning, I know the material fairly well. Yet, some of the questions I found nasty. Like skipping a prefix in a word that I’ve seen recurring many times in preparation materials with a negative prefix, but never without. Or wording a question in a way that makes you, based on the 1500+ practice questions, expect one thing to be asked, and only a concentrated effort allows you to realize that other thing is being asked (I can bet my ass lots of people didn’t notice one particular trap in FI). I’ve also spent an eternity on a question where I wasn’t comfortable leaving it since I was getting XXX.33 with the options given XXX.00 and XXX.50 - I checked at home and I used the right way to calculate it, maybe I’m just dumb. If not, that’s pretty nasty. And so on.
i didn’t get that, are you saying Fixed Income was very tricky and most people missed it? I can’t recall nost FI questions but i remember most were straight forward and one having a minor trick and that’s it. If it was full of tricks i probably bombed it…
I agree. In Equity I thought they were making me a joke. Some of the question were much easier than on the exercises in the book or on the website. I am not saying the whole exam was like that; there were traps. But overall I felt the questions were straight forward.
Actually, the trap would be to complicate things and go look for additional info when you actually dont need them. If you know the material, you know exactly what you need. I hope I am not being too overconfident 
There is too much talk of traps. The CFAI is not testing your awareness of traps, but rather comprehension of the subject material. Furthermore, adding “traps” only makes the exam preparation more difficult from their perspective in terms of writing clear and unambigious questions. I really don’t think there were more than a handful of unfamiliar=trap questions.
I definitely struggled on one morning quant question - felt confident I recalled the formula correctly which I validated post exam - would be intrigued with the right solution but at least reassured that some others seem to have had similar issue
This is huge. Everyone talking about traps I feel like just didnt know the types of questions well enough. If you are unsure about a question you may trick yourself by over-analyzeing it. One of the test writers said this in an interview saying that many candidates are looking for a trick, when if you knew the concept well enough, there isnt a trick. They just want to verify you know it. Certainly there are some harder questions that you may think have tricks, but that is usually you just not knowing the material well enough.
I dont say this with certainty I passed, but I know after reading those questions several times that most of them were pretty straight forward. A large part of L2 is reading comprehension and parsing the material for the required data may be what some people consider a “trick”, who knows.
There were traps but same kind as in EOCs, Mocks & topic test. Who had examined hardly all of those, was prepared on such traps.
was this qaunt question the first or 2nd question in quants? If so i got it correct and the trick was that they gave you different but very similar in description variables to chose from in order to do your calcualtion and get the right response…
Yes (for me, at least).
yes the 2 description of the 2 variables were very similar but there was a subtle difference - it was one of those things you would needed to know… or just compute the calculations with both inputs until you got the correct anwser…
Actually there were 2 traps in that question one was knowing which that variable…the other was knowing stated variable to use to multiply that initial variable in order for the formula to be correct… it was easy to pick thr wrong one if you had not paid a lot of attention to quants… luckily i did pay a lot of attention…
Every question I knew a common way to work the problem wrong the choice was usually there. Several people I talked to said that they thought they did well, and even I did. However, given that the test has all the commonly misworked solutions anybody could be thinknig they are cruising and then bomb the test at the end.
The AM was easier then PM as far as material. But, AM I found myself up against the clock more. PM I found the material harder and knew it was coming because the material was not covered in the AM. Gives you time to brush up on some formulas at lunch and get ready. So that helped.
Yes the one of the 2 inputs was redundant information… I dont think i used to it for anything but i maybe be wrong as i dont remember the other questions very clearly, but i am fairly certain there was 1 input which was redundant and only placed there to confuse you
I know which one you’re talking about and I couldn’t get the answer either. It was a step calculation.
Separately, as a general question, is it possible to derive a CCS with only 1 swap curve?