yup, i’ve never taken any exam using the prep class materials. got a ton of summarized notes, margin notes, etc. scrawled over almost 10,000 pages across CFA, CAIA, PRM and FRM materials. these books will be in a fireproof safe for the rest of my career.
If you want to work for a fund of funds, CAIA is very well known. It is also big in foreign countries for some reason. I talked to some people who worked for Bank of America and they said the company paid for 200 people who worked in their Alt Investments to take the CAIA test.
@rohufish: You must be a good and dedicated reader. I did use the CFAI textbook found them to be very well written and generally good at explaining. Yet I have to give it to study notes as far as time efficiency is concerned. One thing I noticed about the CAIA, is that you only have 1.2min on average to answer a question compared to 1.5min for the CFA (@L1 anyway). Is this a significant challenge for the types of questions you get? Another question for wzupdok: Did you order/use the Flashcards at all (for CAIA)?
i never faced time issues on the CAIA exams. mind you CAIA questions tend not to be calculation intensive. they tend to test concepts much more - they may give you a puzzler, but usually only elemental calcs are needed. the material is not easy though, so you may end up thinking a while before you answer.
CAIA - the questions are computer driven, and incentivizes you to do the questions in sequence. You can go back later to answer hard questions by checking a box, but essentially you are forced to do these questions one after another. I didn’t feel that the time pressure was that bad - I had plenty of time at the end to review the harder questions. The questions are more straight forward than CFA - convertible arbitrage and catastrophic event insurance premiums were some of their favorite central topics - for testing purposes, there are only so many ways they can ask calculation questions. I didn’t order the flash cards so I dont have direct experience with using them - I rehearsed the equations and processes through a variety of techniques.
Thanks for the comments. One more (last?) question. Does the quant in the CAIA examination go beyond what was tested in the CFA L1 examination, and if so, by how much?
http://www.caia.org/uploads/textWidget/wysiwyg/documents/LI-SampleQuestions-Sept08.pdf Here’s what I found after a quick Googling session. It seems like CAIA LI has a ton of overlap with LII and LIII. No offense to the CAIA people on here, but don’t you think you’d serve yourself better by taking courses on Math/Stats, your particular industry or even something like Wall Street Prep?
why don’t you do it first ahahhahaha and then profess an opinion. otherwise, don’t feel obligated to post advice on a topic thats beyond you.
What material do you use for CAIA? Schweser? Also, what about FRM? Can anyone suggest some material?
Still taking comments on the quant aspect of CAIA L1 compared to CFA L1 
I’ve looked tried to find the information on my own, and unsurprisingly, there are differences, but I can’t quite determine the degree of differences. This is quite important for me as it will affect how I plan my summer (there are a couple of things I’d like to do beside the CAIA, but I may have to cut down depending on how quant/formula intensive the exam is).
compared to CFA, it is higher order quant, but simpler calcs if you know what i mean. e.g. CAIA doesn’t cover basic stats etc. they jump straight into multiple regressions usage, start using skewness, kurtosis for returns characteristics, etc. so the calc needed may be simpler, but requires higher order thinking/knowledge. a bit like L3 CFA
rohufish Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > why don’t you do it first ahahhahaha and then > profess an opinion. otherwise, don’t feel > obligated to post advice on a topic thats beyond > you. hahaha, you must love me rohufish! I’m just saying, if the two practice exams on the site are representative of the actual exams then it seems there’s a ton of overlap with the CFA curriculum.
nothing personal - i think i just got a bit too critical there - don’t mind. there actually is very little overlap - CAIA is very different in its scope. there used to be overlap but the latest curriculum is all pure alternatives. if you want to learn the investment characteristics and unique challenges of the alternative asset classes, do CAIA. CAIA is most similar to CFA L3 i’d say, if you were to put a gun to my head.