Quant cont'd

Sorry – I wanted to continue to Quant discussion, but the last post turned into a thread of requests. I’m in sort of the same boat. I pretty much went ignored quant for LI, instead working with what I’d retained from college. I didn’t much retain regression testing, but fortunately (at LI) and unfortunately (at LII) it wasn’t a huge focus before. I decided to give the Cartoon Guide to Statistics a shot at the suggestions of another poster, but I don’t think there was enough focus on my weak areas. Is there something I’m missing here, or is this going to be straight memorization for me?

Plus, somewhere in the Cartoon Guide, the phrase “a unorganized…” was used. I don’t know if they were messing around, but I almost threw up.

What I feel is that you should first start off by brushing up on certain areas of statistics, e.g. z-test, t-test, F-test and so on, and you should be ready to tackle the ordinary least squares section on regression. Stuff like the adj R^2, Schwarz Criterion and AIC…just read through and you should be ok. Pardon me if I am a bit off on stuff like Schwarz criterion and AIC. I haven’t read thru the L2 stuff and I am not sure if it is included. If u need help I can try to help…I think I still retained a good part of what I learnt in school

Schwarz criterion and AIC ? Highly doubtful.

questions. followed by more questions. with a few questions thrown in. Best way if you are having difficulty.

Same problem here. What I’m doing is to go back to CFAI books and read them closely and trying to work through examples and think through concepts. I’d much rather blitz through Schweser and cram before the test, like I did for L1, but was getting too many wrong on the practice tests. No shortcuts here. Even the schweser L2 blog master said it took her three times to read some of the multiple regression stuff before it made sense. I guess I’m doing exactly what CFAI wants us to do, which is to actually learn and understand the stuff. It’s going to put me behind schedule though, but I’ve heard that Econ isn’t as tough, so maybe I can make up some time there. GL

If you have the time, it might help a lot to run some hypothetical regressions on Excel and then changing the independent variable values around to see how your results change. At least for me, a lot of the regression topics in the CFA curriculum were really hard to nail down until I had to take care of a few regression projects at work and learned it that way.

Excel-lent suggestion. I didn’t even realize that excel had stat functions and of course it does. This is good because I use excel a lot, and will learn quant better and am more likely to actually use this in the real non-cfa exam world, if I can model some samples in there. thanks Oh and I got the cartoon book of statistics and it’s not the panacea. These are dense cartoons and not that humorous. More like How things work type of stuff. It jumps around and only gets to multiple regression in the last few pages. Doing a good job on quant will really throw you off your schedule. However because its so difficult, many people (non-AF-ers of course) will not get it. I mean this is not the type of topic you can say, alright I have three days to study this. Hopefully we can rack up higher points on the L2 exam by doing a thorough job now.