I am planning to start studying for FRM Level 1 exam to be taken in Nov. Can anyone pls guide me if the Schwesser material is enough for preparing for the exam and is there any study group or classes in Kuwait for FRM.
Unless you already have a professional background doing risk analysis I think you will find Schwesser might fall short. You should be able to complement the gaps however with Bionic Turtle, college textbooks, the FRM handbook and the internet (wikipedia, etc.) The curriculum does rely rather heavily on linear algebra and calculus although I think there were only a couple questions that hit on those points last year. Schwesser doesn’t really prepare you at all for this. I took Level 1 this past November after recently obtaining my CFA charter and I still found the material rather challenging, especially the quant sections and some of the VAR analysis. Nonetheless, as a core resource I think Schweser is very good.
Thanks a lot joeisenb…Much appreciated. I have appeared for CFA level 1 this Dec and so hoping to pass. I know i have to work extremely hard. I think il stick to Schwesser since i used it for preparing for Level 1 and i found the content explained well. Is Qants like out of the world to understand or one can still manage?
No, it’s not insanely difficult. In fact there is a lot of cross over with CFA Level 1 and 2. The difficulty is in the new sections: some new continuous probability distributions (Weibell, generalized pareto, etc) and volatility estimation (ARCH, GARCH, exponentially weighted moving average). Note though that last year’s exam did require you to have a good understanding of the derivation of the calculus-derived formula for the normal distribution which schwesser didn’t touch on at all.
How much in demand FRM is in Kuwait or any gulf country? I presume dubai debacle proves that Risk Management is in scarcity in Gulf. How many people in Risk Management are from Financial Engineering Background? I was talking to one guy he suggested that most of the accountants are in risk management as they know more about the financial standards. Is that true? What path you going to follow?.. … I guess too many questions to answer.