@mitch895
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Haha. Nice work guys.
@Arbitrageur – I found the PM a surprise in that it was way, way easier than I expected. Had to force myself to slow down and still had it done in 2’10. Got up had a drink of water and a wander around then reviewed the exam again. Then a third time. Made one change to an answer (there was a trick that I hadn’t caught the first time).
Like @Stuj79, I did find that the first 12Q had a few that could go either way, but other than that there was literally only 1 question that I didn’t know (and I looked that up afterwards and couldn’t find it in the curriculum). Of the 60 questions, I was 100% certain on 33, and pretty confident on, 21 that I was pretty confident on, and only 6 questions that I am not sure of (i.e., two answers seemed equally likely). Looking around *cough* other places it seems that quite a few people found the PM very difficult, which makes me wonder if the 3rd party prep providers might not have covered it all (I’ve only ever used CFAI’s materials).
For the AM I too got caught out on Q1. I actually answered it then noticed I had missed some of the fine print so had to re-do it. Finished Q1 around 7 min behind schedule. Caught up and ended up completing the exam, with around 5 minutes to go back and “clean up” a few answers.
I’m actually looking forward to getting results back. I have guesstimated between 119 and 128 points in the AM, 46-51 points in the PM.
Agree wholeheartedly with @Arbitrageur.
It’s all about speeding with caution. Read the question twice just to be sure you know exactly what they are asking (sounds/is obvious, I know, but in every mock I have lost a few points – and time – through starting my answer before reading the question properly!).
Another thing I’ve been doing is revisiting past exam questions, at random (using Randbetween function on excel, setting years between 2006-2014 and questions 1-12…. I have excluded 2015 because I only completed that a few days back and found it to be pretty easy). Also the CFA Topic Tests are good. Also using Excel, I’ve been tracking my estimated multiple-choice score, weighting each topic against the proportionate number of topic tests provided and topic score as the average score. Maybe overdoing it a little, but it’s good to have something to indicate how my scores are progressing.
I too have some GIPS summary notes (which is pretty much just a list of required/recommended disclosures) which I will be reviewing between exams.
I’m taking a very similar approach.
For constructed response I found there to be a fairly generic structure to the guideline answers for Return Objective, Liquidity, Time Horizon. I have now practiced these enough that they transfer to paper very easily and quickly (the guideline answers were often less wordy than when I wrote them).
More generally, I keep tabs of where I am up to by scribbling on the cover page any of the questions I’ve skipped & potential points (i.e, Q1, D, 3points, Q7, E, 6 points…). I mark an asterix beside any that are particularly difficult/slow (ie., time to answer doesn’t justify points).
I also keep track of approx. how many points I think I have picked up at each question. This was I can sort of get a feel for how I’m going and whether I’m on track.
Personally I’m not too stressed about leaving maybe 10 points worth unanswered if it means I can answer the rest of the exam well.
Date would be “June 2016”. Title would be “Level II Candidate”.
Being listed as “Candidate” only requires that you have registered (which includes payment) for the exam. Come August (or whenever results are issued) you are no longer a Candidate (until you re-register). The only potential “grey area” is around how you list your candidacy between sitting the exam and getting your result.
Hi Arbitrageur,
Yes, I’m not sure (can’t remember) whether any individual active manager had an exposure larger than the passive portfolio. I do know that in the question the passive portfolio was well below 50% (may have been 30% or so). Can’t recall where exactly it was (may have been an old CFA Mock exam). I think the ambiguity and inconsistency of the definition (as @Stuj79 and I seem to have had similar but opposite errors!) suggest that an answer with explanation for either Yes/No would probably be acceptable in the AM.
For the AM a tad short of 70%.
Averaged across the PM mock should bring the total score across the finish line above 70%. I am spending the next few days reviewing the summary sections of readings, rereading anything I can’t recall. I’m beginning to find it difficult to find areas of improvement (which I suppose is a good thing). My weakest area is in currency and some of the swaps/forwards questions but I’m hesitant to spend too much more time working on those. Feel there is probably a better return on study time if I review GIPS and AMC etc (which I figure should get a good 4 – 8 questions on the PM = 3.3% – 6.6% of entire exam!).
I actually re-sat the question I missed yesterday and going flat-out I completed it in around 12 min for 16 points. I wasted time (probably close to 20 min all-up) on a question that I eventually bombed on (scored myself 9 points), so reallocating time between those questions would have made a huge difference (+7 points = 3.9% = 1.9% across entire exam). Overall I was actually pretty happy with my answers. It’s the first Mock I have sat where I printed it off beforehand, and I found it much more comfortable being able to underline and scribble on the exam paper.
Strategy-wise I always give a super-quick flick through the exam to see where the easy points are hiding, and I picked up that the (missed) question was going to be easy. Basically I wanted to put myself at a disadvantage, to err on the side of caution. On the day those “easy” questions are going to be first to tackle; or perhaps more precisely, questions that I’m unsure of are going to get thrown to the back of the queue. I also guesstimate my score as I go so I get a feel for how many “points” I have locked in. For the AM exam I need a minimum of 115, preferably 120+.
Of course who knows what the actual exam is going to look like. If it’s like the 2015 Mock then I’d be very happy. Hopefully not too many ambiguous questions in the PM exam.
Good luck!
Sat the 2015 AM Mock yesterday. I would be super happy if the exam this coming Saturday was of similar content and difficulty!
The biggest disappointment was that I didn’t complete the entire exam. Ran out of time and missed a whole question (which would have scored me an easy 8 – 10 points!). Classic case of being sucked into providing detailed answers to questions where 2 – 3 sentences would have sufficed (there were questions that were super-easy, but took 5 min of writing to score the 3 points).
Even so, my overall result wasn’t too bad. Also there was a stack of material that I expected to see which wasn’t on the exam, so all going well we might get to see it make an appearance this coming weekend (which will help bank some quick points).
That’s probably enough speculation for one day, now to get a few solid days of review in before the big day :smiley:
Hi @Stuj79,
Wow! If you’re clearing around 83% in the AM and 73% in the PM you are smashing it! Well done!
I am scoring ok, though I don’t want to get too excited as they could pull some completely random/difficult material out on the day!
It’s hard to know how to score the AM exam so I’ve tended to err on the side of caution – i.e., if I provide an answer that isn’t as good as the guideline (but is still correct) I might, for example, assign a score of 7/10. My handwriting is terrible so I am a bit concerned that it will lose me points. Time-wise I think I have tamed the AM beast – have it down to around 2’45, including allowance for 7 minutes of toilet breaks.
I found the “AM” multiple choice exam tough. There was one question set that I found really, really tough. When I sat the “PM” multiple choice exam the only thing I really stuffed up on was GIPS (I figure we will probably see a 6-part question on GIPS and/or AMC, so for 5% of the overall exam I want to make sure I am all over this). For both the CFAI multiple choice exams time was not an issue – completed both in around 2 hours at a fairly laid-back pace.
Ethics is always tricky. I will give it another review, but as it’s a maze of ambiguity I accept I will probably drop 1 or 2 questions in the PM exam.
At this stage of the study it’s getting a lot harder to find improvements. I ran an analysis of past mock exams and my estimated score improvement for a topic category is in the 1.5% – 2% range. Hopefully I can improve my estimated score by around 2% over the next week.
If I sat the exam today I would most likely get through (assuming a MPS ~68%) but I don’t want to leave it to chance so I am very happy to have another week of study. I will probably sit the 2015 Mock tomorrow afternoon, after work.
Good luck!
If you can afford to take some time off, do it. Not only might it save you another year’s study to re-sit the exam, but it will likely reduce your stress going into it.
Going into last year’s exam it was a particularly busy period for my company, so my final preparation for exams was crammed into the late hours of night and early mornings. Come exam day I was exhausted. My brain felt like it was operating at maybe 60%-70% capacity. As a result there were questions on the exam where although I knew the material, my brain was slow to retrieve the required information.
Consequentially I completed the exams with the expectation that I was probably a borderline pass/fail, but very disappointed that I had “dropped the ball” so close to the finish line.
Result was that I passed, but I am still not happy with my performance on the day.
Thanks @rsparks – yes, understand the concepts behind pricing and have a fair bit of experience with commissions for retail-sized trades, suppose was more thinking of what the rates look like at a wholesale level. Specifically if the equivalent interest rate was at the risk-free rate it must be lower than the retail borrowing rate. Given the protection costs for most investors tend to be >1.5% above the retail lending rate, which for most Australian banks tends to track at around >2.3% over the risk-free, that would suggest that using options to establish the position is in the order of 3.8% less expensive that what is currently offered to retail investors, or 2.5% less expensive after my fee 🙂
Haven’t heard of iron condors before – had to Google that one! 🙂
Yes, you can be given partial marks.
Marks are allocated based on the completeness (and accuracy, of course) of the answers given. Remember that it’s all about answering the question, so if they ask you for 1 example of something that there are 3 or 4 answers to, providing any one of these possible solutions should get you full marks (subject to accuracy/completeness).
That’s my understanding of it anyway. Further discussion of the processes employed by the CFAI can be found on their website and in their white papers.
Personally I think there is probably more chance of getting full marks for unambiguous questions, such as those requiring a specific calculation or asking for something to be “identified”. Looking over past years’ exams, some of the other types of questions seem to have a level of ambiguity that can be challenging…. Good luck
Anyone’s guess if this topic gets a run in the exam.
Is your question about the impact of secondary issuances on spreads? If so, the reason spreads are affected is that it effects the order at which bondholders must be repaid if the company defaults. In other words, if a company issues more bonds then their total capital is increased, which reduces risk to those first in line: this reduction in risk should tend to reduce the risk premium on their bonds (those first in line). Of course from a market-level perspective it’s counterintuitive is that you would expect that increasing supply of bonds to a market should necessitate increasing the spread (to entice investors).
(not sure if that answer the question??)
I’m sure everyone has their own way of approaching it, but for me memorisation doesn’t work. The only way I can get information to really stick is to apply/practice it, and even then it’s tough getting through the curriculum without new information pushing out old info…
That said, from a strategic perspective I think it’s important to go into the AM exam expecting there to be maybe 15 points or so that are in the “holy crap, I don’t remember that” basket, and to leave them and move onto stuff that you can actually pick some points up on. I know that I need to be conscious of this before going in because I hate to leave stuff unfinished.
Looking back over past exams there tends to be the inclusion of some pretty random stuff, stuff that is probably only recallable by those with photographic memories or working in the specific area of question.
The past is no indication of the future, but bear in mind that on past AM exams, roughly 25% have involved “calculating” an answer, around 40% in “justifying” a statement or solution, and around 25% in explaining a solution or concept (then there are around 10% of questions that fall in other categories). It’s the 25% of “explaining” type questions that require the really deep knowledge of the topic; the 40% can probably be scraped through if you understand the concept and some of the key attributes of a subject but haven’t memorised all the pros and cons. Calculate-type questions are a combination of simple things (easy points!) and tricky stuff designed to break your brain.
Good luck!
@Arbitrageur I actually performed a more detailed analysis of the “type” of questions which produced some interesting results.
Basically there are only 5 or 6 areas which appear consistently (comprising ~15% of AM exam points) while the rest is scattered across the rest of the course material in no particularly logical or consistent manner. I even looked to trends/cycles; sure enough those building the exams were clever enough not to leave anything reliable there to work off.
Now we are counting down 60 days to exam it’s time to crank up the study and (hopefully) kick some arse <span>:smile:</span>
itsalwayslupus said:Are you interested from a personal finance perspective, or professionally?Both 😉
@xhu21 – yep, you’re most certainly right!!
In my firm we set work within SAA targets around which we have a guideline +/- “range”. Though we base this “range” with regard to the portfolio in aggregate. For example a 17% allocation +/- 5% means we can have anywhere between 12% and 23% exposure. I suppose I sped through the investment corridor reading thinking they apply the “corridor” in the same manner… I was wrong!
Glad to be able to put this one to bed (and hopefully we get some “easy” questions like this on the exam!)
