If you guys thought there is any chance of absorbing and retaining what you just read…wait till you get to FI and Derivatives as the icing. The amount of detail and mechanics in these readings are a complete brain fryer! Any tips for anyone done with these sections?
ask questions that you find tough – and work thro’ the solution with others. that is the only way. and we seem to be doing WAY TOO LESS OF QUESTION SOLVING now. Even though it is that a lots of folks are just getting started reading - asking questions instead of posting lame, inexcusable threads like “what is my gf doing”, “which book has a better cover”, “is schweser’s girl on this year’s book better than last years”, etc. etc. asking a question and working thro’ its solution has far more merits. Sorry to vent and possibly hijack this thread, by that’s how I feel. I learn more by problem solving.
very true cpk. last year around we had much more ppl posting questions. i’ll second your thoughts.
cpk, need a favor please. What do you recommend should be the ideal way of going about doing a subject. What I do is go through Schweser and do the concept checkers. Have done book 1,2 and 5 till date. Should I go through CFAI/Qbank simulateously? The first rading has given me a good understanding of the subject, though cannot really boast of the amount I have retained in terms of memory. I know that methods of studying are relative, but some advice would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.
cpk getting angry is not at all good for the forum. I call it a bottom for equity markets today. The only way the stocks move now on will be UP!
the drop in posted questions makes sense since due to the pass rates - fewer people taking L2 means fewer questions asked. I can only expect that the L3 board is even worse. that being said, i still agree that we should try to post questions more often to help each other out.
i’m only a couple of readings into it (reading about term structure volatility or whatever) but as of this point fixed income is by far my favorite part of the curriculum
I totally agree with CPK, the attitude of candidates this year is a little disappointing. I don’t know if its the market or what, but both people on AF and that I know in person don’t seem to be taking things very seriously so far. I can’t say I’ve been the most diligent in my own studying so far but I know what needs to be done to pass and I’m picking up the pace accordingly. But really, to get back on topic, I will be the first to admit that I also really struggle with both of these topics. I did plenty of questions on them last year (though probably not enough) and certain things just never seemed to click for me… I think I was in the middle for FI and failed derivatives. I will do as many practice questions as I can again this year and hope that by spending plenty of time with these topics it will eventually “click,” but if anyone has any pointers on this topic I’d love to hear them!
aimee - the only way to get things going is to work thro’ a couple of problems. that brings more questions to the table and helps clarify the concept. That is all. It might take maybe a couple of hours to get one problem done and dusted on a forum like this, with a large number of participants… but once learned it is hard to forget.
CPK, agree with you, but just passed L1 so i am trying to read thru the CFAI text before i get started tackling the major questions. Plan on finishing the reading by March 2oth or so then will be doing nothing but questions from there on out… Will def be posting where I stumble, because this board has provided me great insight in the past.
cpk, I will be starting problem solving in a week’s time…Since I passed in December and started around in Feb…i’m struggling to finish the readings… Will def post some quality questions here…later… Problem solving is most critical…and we have plenty of talented ppl on AF…Will need all your help to pass I’m very glad that you posted on L1 forum too. That clearly helped me clear some hard concepts…especially FSA…
I’ve posted a few problems here that I couldn’t do on my own and CP and others have been helpful in helping me understand them. Even though its tedious I think you have to work through these problems over and over. I just finished the derivatives reading the other day and am now working my way through the end of chapter problems again. These are particularly annoying b/c of the amount of calculator work, but I can’t any other way to remember how to do them then to work through them.
I just started 1st Feb and still need to cover all the reading once - So can’t bring much to the table as of now. 
swaptiongamma Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > cpk getting angry is not at all good for the > forum. > I was thinking the same thing, too funny! I had also been under the impression that cpk was already chartherholder since I’ve never seen him stumped.
I don’t think they take top 1% of the scorers. It all comes down to cpk’s paper which almost always comes out to be 100% (240/240 or 120/120) and then they nuke the remainder 60% of the people, to get the passing score to 40%. Why in the freaking world do they need 2 months to do this?
FI is definitely a brain flyer. But it’s worth it to spend time on this topic because the FI materials are very testable (like credit analysis, CMO, CPR/SMM/PSA, binomial trees for various types of securities: bonds w/wo put/call options, step up callable notes and capped floater). Derivatives are easy on some and hard on others. If you belong to the latter group, make sure you know them.