CAIA Anxiety

13Sep08

One post about the CAIA exam has led to an enormous (relatively speaking. this blog gets usually about 2 hits a day. now it gets 20) spike in the traffic on this blog.  In a shameless attempt to generate more traffic, here’s a nother CAIA post.

I’ve spent most nights and the last couple weekends locked away in my apartment studying. That said, it really hasn’t been so bad.  The Schweser question bank is enormously helpful and I’m geting 70% give or take on the practice exams.  Should be enough to pass & it’s just one more week of studying (and the stunted social life + poor diet that comes with it) until the exam.

You have to make some tradeoffs in studying I think.  Like Real Estate, Private Equity, and Credit Derivatives–I know that there will be one or two questions each on DCF, IRR, and CDO structures.  I will never, ever use any of that stuff in real life.  I don’t think it’s worth it to memorize the keystrokes on my calculator.  I’d rather focus on concepts that I already sort-of know but am more likely to use practically.

Of course this also bodes ill for the level 2 exam which involves even more esoteric math.  A central problem with all of this is that I don’t actually do any of the quantitative stuff at my job.  In what I do, there’s a big focus on the the nature of funds, due diligence, and other “fundamentals”, but no math.  On my practice exams I’m getting perfect scores on those sections but maybe only 50% on quantitative methods.

Hell, I got a C in statistics in college.  I hate math.

So here’s hoping the distribution of questions leans towards concepts and not applications.  Good luck to everyone else if you haven’t taken the exam yet.

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