Best bang for your buck Study Sessions

Hi all, Perhaps its already been discussed, but last year someone put together a nice post that basically summarized which Study Sessions had the fewest LOS’s yet the highest weights, as a way to focus your review time. In other words a LOS per subject weighting ratio. For example they pointed out that LI Econ had a ton of LOS’s yet a relatively small weighting. Just curious on people’s thought as we ramp up for review time.

It seems to me that alternative investments in the low hanging fruit. It counts the same as PM, Derivatives, or FI and is basically 2 calculations and some general info on hedge funds.

Yeah… can we talk about that?? “Alts” is 5-15 % of the exam yet is a mere 70 pages of a CFAI text, yet is the same weight as the 300 pages that comprises fixed income or corp fin or any of the other 5-15 sections… I am just hoping calc’ing the taxes payable for ATER isn’t on there - yuck.

what section is alternate investments in schweser?

it’s SS 13 right after the residual income chapter. Real estate and hedge funds…

5-15 means that we are going to see at least 1 item set… can they really gives us 3? seems crazy

Yeah that ATCF thing is reall bad…and the depreciation part is not even mentioned in the text while Schweser make a big thing out of it.

HotCFABabe where are you getting those numbers from? Would like to take a look at that is it one the CFAI site?

http://www.cfainstitute.org/cfaprog/courseofstudy/topicareaweights.html

Un - f’n - believable. Here I am 3 1/2 weeks from d day and I just found out that Alt Assets has as high a value of either Fixed income or quant. Great job, eleven. Get out of 2007 and get to work.

Is there really an official alternatives section? It’s a bit much to have 5 - 15% of the exam on just real estate and hedge funds. Would it be wrong to assume this is just a miscellaneous section?

It says right on the topic weights that its between 5%-15%

Nice one. I’ll make sure I can KILL this section as it has great return potential for the amount of hours required to get it straight.

Figured I would post this in case it helps anyone: I just went through all of the study sessions in Secret Sauce and the three topics with the most pages per study session by far were PM, Econ, and Quant (in that order). The amount of material relative to weighting is rather high for these three, with the rest of the topics averaging about half of the pages. Granted this is based on a summary of the summary but I thought it was helpful, if not really much of a surprise.