Back to the grind...

The dust is settling following the wedding (and so is my stomach after all that food!), and things are getting back to normal. We had a wonderful Brazilian dinner last night with a few friends from the wedding that helped us during the day, and our wedding photographer was in attendance to capture some of the happy moments. Too much meat has left me feeling slightly peaky today, but I should be right as rain tomorrow.

As for the CFA study, I am in week two now, having looked at Ethics last week. Ethics provide to be a little tricky, but not too challenging. Most seemed to be almost common sense, but there are parts where a candidate needs to learn to think like the CFA Institute wants you to, not as you might intuitively think. Nonetheless, Ethics accounts for quite a large chunk of Level I, and I need to make sure I get it licked to stand any chance of passing the exam.

I started on quants yesterday, only to find that my shiny new calculator kept giving me rather odd answers. The Stalla guide is fairly idiot-proof, and I was following the key strokes to calculate annuity payment, but was getting vastly different answers to those that the book was suggesting. Them, I just got a few error messages. So, quick as a flash, I switched to Economics (micro) to make the bets use if the remaining day. I sat the mock exam I have on CD, thinking that, given that I used to LECTURE micro-economics, I should be okay.

No such luck.

No study or revision, and I managed a measly 57% on the multiple choice. But several of the questions were fairly ambiguous, and given that my calculator wasn’t working I estimated many calculations involving elasticity and marginal product/revenue/cost et cetera. I’ll hit the books again tonight, and try to remember some of the formulas for elasticity.

Just as a final sign-off, if you need a laugh on a Monday, tale a look at this article. I should stress that the subject matter is not funny – but look at the author of the piece…

As a final note, I see that we are under 5 months from Christmas.

CFA briefing cum Information Session

So, my parents and extended family are here, ready for Saturday’s big day. That doesn’t stop the clock as far as the CFA goes, and on Friday evening I attended a CFA briefing cum Information Session, run by CFA Singapore. The evening was interesting inasmuch as I found that many members at the session seemed to be university students. Others were I guess drawn from a large cross-section of the usual suspects (I-Banking, consulting et cetera). We also learnt that the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation is the largest employer of CFA charter-holders in Singapore. GIC employs 89, whilst the next employer - Citigroup – employs 72). Finally, we also learnt that Singapore has the largest amount of CFA charter-holders per capita in the world.

Unsurprising, given that even the CFA brochure recounts that, in relation to one charter-holder “… the head of the Government Investment Corp. (GIC) in Singapore, whom she highly respected, strongly recommended the CFA Program to her. “I felt that if I could be anywhere near as successful as he is I had to get myself a CFA [charter].” You go girl.

But we did learn some interesting stuff as well. Like the fact that whilst the pass rate is kept secret these days, it sued to be 70% of the top percentile. So if the top dog gets 100%, the pass rate is 70% and so on. Yikes! Well, the CFA is essentially an American certificate, and that is a very American way of grading. At University you often hear rumours of Harvard et al. failing the bottom 10%, and giving distinctions to those in the top 10%.

The exam day itself is two 3 hour exams (one in the morning, and one in the afternoon), and we should get the results 6 weeks after the exam.

This looks tougher than anything I’ve done before, and I do wish I’d paid more attention to Financial Analysis at Uni (youthful exuberance and a devotion to qualitative methods…)