Progress on book 6?
check out the threads, there is one about book 6 results
around a 70% for the 1st complete one. after you teach me the ins and outs of swaps next week, my scores best go up! blou23 = reason bannisja has any prayer at passing this test = my homeboy = drinking buddy after the test (i owe you many for not letting me slack or accept failure as an option). i hope you like carbombs. nibs mentioned them on this board yesterday and i’ve been craving one ever since. that’s right people, this little girl has a big liver and she plans to test it considerably at 5:15pm on 6/7 in a serious way. random aside- has anyone in qbank or anywhere come across any really hard pensions vignettes? blou and i studied last week and we started going over pensions- realized that we could seriously be in for some danger, yet neither of us had felt that we’d been crushed with too too many hard qbank vignettes on them. in book 6 1st test there was one pensions vignette- pretty tame. why do i think pensions are going to crush me? i feel like there’s a lot that could get asked that hasn’t been asked of me yet. if anyone has a hard pensions vignette- toss it up here. i want to get smacked around to learn them better.
I think book 6 is quite easy, more straightforward than CFAI mock exam. I was actually disappointed that the vignettes on book 6 are not much different from those in Q-bank. Competitive Advantage is something I should heavily work on. I routinely got 5 out 6 wrong… what do you say?
i went 6 for 6 on that today on the book 6 test. ever since pinkman threw up that q-bank vignette, i’ve been cool- pink THANK YOU for that…i really studied those answers and the subtle differences and why i got so many wrong. but it almost makes me nervous that i’m learning what schweser wants to hear, not the CFAI. i when reading it try to determine 2 things- cost or differentiation- in the vignette does it say stuff about “made some new state of the art factory to cut costs”- lean cost… or “highly specialized products that people pay a premium for”- differentiation. the focus part is a bit harder to figure out, but i’ve taken the approach lately that if it goes out there to tell you how blah blah corp is multinational, stuff in the US, abroad, lots of diversified products in many different industries, etc, probably less of a focus co. anytime it says something narrowing stuff down- like- only sells in the northeast or produces 1 crazy specialized computer chip that’s 80% of it’s sales, etc, think focus. i try to read them and most of the time diff vs cost comes in pretty clear- the focus vs not focus is a bit trickier b/c there’s more grey but at least on ones i’ve done lately, i’m doing better. they are tricky though. hopefully if we get them on the test, they will be screaming one way or the other, not toss ups.
So what did you learn about focus VS not focus? I just differ them by segments or not segment… but on the mock, there s a case clear stating the player is in a niche market. then I went tight for the choice focus, while the answer is not focus. I went nuts by wording. So Niche = differentiate, Niche Not =segmentation, therefore not = focus, right?
SPOILER- EARMUFFS ON IF YOU HAVE NOT TAKEN EXAM 1: you talking about the pinapple co? if yes, i was torn on that one whether being a pinapple company in and of itself would make you a focus co. i didn’t go focus, though, b/c the paragraph kind of went out of it’s way to tell you that this pinapple co produced full pinapples and canned ones and mushed ones, etc… the full range of what a pinapple co could produce. so while being a pinapple company i think is a niche co to start out with, i at least went with differentiation and not focus since in the world of pinapple companies, it did a little of everything it possibly could with a pinapple- not just let’s say sliced pinapples? i like pinapples a lot. perhaps my love of this fruit led me to the right answer. mangoes, strawberries… i’d be golden if the test were all fruit all the time.