Blackberry Analysis Post

i had the whole thing written here, but now I moved it here:

Failed it, but then passed it

Life changed a lot over the last couple years. I failed the second CFA in 2010. I was on a weird sleep schedule, my mind was kind of a mess, and I failed it. I had to go through all that crap again, and then I passed it in 2011. Level 3 will be the next step, but it will have to wait. I'm doing an MBA at University of Toronto now, so once that's done, it will be time for round three. Between the two CFA levels, and the completed MBA, I'm hoping I'll be able to get a decent job in 2013 (graduation year). Just to live exactly the same way I did before the MBA, I will need to make an additional $20,000 per year (to cover debt repayments). If it doesn't happen, I'm basically completely screwed. Finding work in Finance is so hard if you're not well connected... Oh, how I wish mommy and daddy owned a hedge fund...

5 more study days left

I've been on "vacation" for a week and have been just reading my notes and doing problems. I don't know if I'll pass. I haven't done any mock exams because I haven't really felt confident enough in EVERYTHING to do that. Also, I still haven't done any problems for study sessions 16-18, though I did recently finish reading, summarizing in word, and doing example problems for them. I'll get that done over the next 4 days, and use Friday as formula memorization and polish. I've done so many damn questions in the last couple weeks that if I fail it won't be for lack of effort or study time... it will be something about the approach I guess. I went really heavy on reading and comprehension early on without doing as many problems as I would have liked.

I started studying for this thing 4 freakin months ago... I have trouble remembering stuff that happened last week, so to retain something I learned 4 months ago in vivid exam prepped detail is quite a challenge. Like a huge challenge. Like a challenge on par with successfully summoning a boner and doing Rosie O'Donnell (I don't think I'd be able to do it). Anyway, 5 days left... review for 3 sessions to go. I have to sleep now cuz it's 4 am. Hopefully my sleep schedule will fix itself by Saturday.

I will be so pissed if I fail this thing.

15 down, 3 to go

My plan to finish my first run through by May 8th is not going to happen any more. Things went a little slower over the last week because of some stuff at work that, although positive for me, cost me time on updating resume, writing a cover letter, and so on. I don't know if I mentioned what my job was, but although the company is pretty reputable, I am way the fuck at the bottom of the totem pole; I'm on par with the mail guy. A manager approached me about an analyst position (a modest one, but it has the word analyst in the title so I'm happy). I'm pretty sure their deal is they'd like someone with analyst education, but they don't have the budget to pay for someone with analyst experience as well. Fancy title with shitty pay check? I'll take it! Can't be any worse than what I'm being paid right now. It's not a done deal though. At this point, I'm a turd in the pile, hoping to be scooped out and polished off for the gem within. We'll see about that though.

Whether or not I get that, the CFA level 2 exam is closing in fast, and I feel like I'll be more or less ready. The Fixed Income section really didn't do what I was expecting it to. I recall from level one that bonds with embedded puts and calls would converge on specific values as interest levels reached certain points (and yield curves for option free bonds would continue their more natural curves, if that makes sense). CFA 1 taught how find the max/min range wherein the fair price for an option embedded bond would lie, but then it said pinpointing a price was beyond the scope of the course. Naturally, I assumed that pinpointing this expected fair price, with a certain level of probability associated with it, would be something that came up in level two. Nope. No mention of it.

It actually focused very little on valuating conventional bonds. The 14th study session had a general run through of some of the theories out there that applied to fixed income instruments in general (much of which was redundant with level 1). It had a big chunk on credit ratings, and what factors bond rating agencies and investors will be concerned about, and so on. The 15th study session had a lot on MBSs and ABSs, with particular attention to the nominal spread, Z-spread, and Option Adjusted Spread.

Fixed Income was a very reasonable section, and much less quantitative than I expected. The math was there, but it was more in the background. For example, it showed how to draw up a binomial tree for an MBS or ABS based on treasury spot rates and adding a certain amount of spread until the pricing is right (PVof CFs = Price of security). I can't imagine them asking a multiple choice question on the exam where you have to draw a whole fucking binomial tree with all kinds of forward rates to consider (let alone 3 of them if you want to calculate duration and convexity). And a Monte Carlo Sim? Forget about it, unless they bring mainframe computers for all the candidates to work with... They're guaranteed to ask questions about how you would do these things conceptually, or even one branch of a tree I guess? But even drawing a branch would be kinda stupid... Anyways, Fixed Income was not so bad at all and I think I can suck up good marks in this section. Or I may just end up sucking. Whateva.

Derivatives on the other hand... this was one of my few 50-70 regions for the level 1 exam, and I expect it to be difficult in L2 again. I've been reading SS 16, and it's going slowly. The formulas are long, and many. Conceptually, it's just outright tougher than the other stuff in here, in my opinion. I can see why these instruments were used to fuck around so much leading up to the recession; they are trixy bastard. You can make them about as ambiguous and misleading as you want (and many did).

What a fun post that was! thanks for reading

Minor Burnout

I fucked up a bit on Friday and Saturday... I had planned to finish up session 12 (last equity session), and hopefully do 13 too (which is a small one). I thought I'd be able to finish those two, and even have some time left to review. I'm going to sound like a whiny little bitch right now, but all the hours of study got to me, and I was burned out. I did study about an hour Friday night when I got home from work, but I was so tired that I just couldn't focus on the reading, and I was in a rough mood too. I was lethargic from lack of physical activity, and so many hours of work, study, sleep, and repeat. I collapsed in my bed at about 7:45 pm and woke up around 10:30 pm.
The plan was to keep going, but when I sat down and looked at the bland black and blue text in my Stalla book, I had a mental failure and just said fuck it. 'Fuck it' became a phrase that was kind of my theme for that night, and well into the following morning.

I played some piece of shit computer game that I had, and just rolled with it until about 9 am Saturday morning. That's like 11 hours of video games. It was a single player RPG, so it wasn't intense like the fucking crazy high school kids play online, but still... I was a damn zombie. At so many points I'd tilt my head away from the screen and catch a glimpse of my shitty sony alarm clock and its annoying green glow. It would flash X, Y, or Z o'clock in the morning. Each time I checked it, I'd stare at it for a little while. I'd groan a bit, and think about all the time I was wasting. I'd weigh that wasted time out against the prospect of continuing the ungodly collapse of will power that had suddenly come over me, and arrive unquestionably at what seemed like the most reasonable conclusion at the time: Fuck it.

What happened on Saturday is kind of a haze for me. I don't really remember what time I woke up, but I do remember that my coffee was orgasmic, even if my egg cheese and ham sandwiches were sub-par at best. I went to clean myself up cuz I felt like dog shit. I looked in the mirror, and I looked pretty rough; like an extra in a low budget vampire flick. Then it was study time. I managed to finish up study session 12 in about an hour and a half. I was mostly done it, so there's not much there for me to pat myself on the back about, but whatever, it was done. My room mate had some buddies over, so we played some X-box 360 until about 3:30 am, and then I went to bed.

Today's Sunday, and I feel refreshed. I went to the gym, ate good healthy food, and studied like an Asian from a poor family on a scholarship. I didn't start on SS13, I just reviewed older materials, and it went okay, nothing stands out as having given me problems.

To summarize all this, I learned a good lesson this weekend; study hours are not all equal; they have diminishing returns after a certain number of them in a week, and they also get worse in an unhealthy lifestyle. Coming into my burnout, I was finding it harder and harder to concentrate, and that was a function of having no balance at all in my life. The fact that I'd been eating not-too well, neglecting the gym, and ignoring all kinds of basic human needs/comforts to squeeze another couple of hours in was not helping me. That being said, I have some new policies on time budgeting; I need to hit the gym 3 times weekly for at least an hour each time so that I can keep feeling confident and alert. I need food ready to eat, sitting in tupperware so that I can just eat when I'm hungry, or have something to take to work and not worry about it. So far, the trend has been that if I have no food, I order a pizza/burger/deep fried bullshit. If my fridge is empty, I shouldn't go upstairs to study, I should go deal with that problem, and study after.

I'm on track to officially finish my first run through all study sessions by May 8th, as long as no more major burnouts happen. 54 days to go until the CFA exam.

Well into study session 12

There are 58 days until the CFA exam. For any university midterm or final, with the number of study hours available in that time, especially with the limited other responsibilities I have, that would be an eternity. That's not the case here. I wouldn't say I'm "tripping balls" or "going ape shit crazy" but I realized it's coming; it's feeling less and less like some abstract goal for the future. Any candidates reading this, I suspect, are feeling the same way, even the douchebags going on the analyst forums and talking shit about how they already know everything, and how they're gonna (or already are) making bank at Goldman Sachs as an Analyst/Trader/Dickhead.

I flipped through the pages of the texts, and also opened up a couple of my notes at random to flip through those too. A lot of what I saw made me groan and say "Fuuuuck, I remember this kind of.... but how exactly did that go??? Was it... ugggh..." or "How did GAAP differ from IFRS on that one, and which was which?" or "what was that formula again?" and so on. I took a breath and told myself that I made a pretty thorough run through it, even though it was probably only fresh in my memory in chunks and for short bursts of time. I managed to grasp the stuff at some point, so come review time, it will hopefully come back to me quickly, and repetition should cement it.

The good news is that study sessions 10 and 11 (both equity) were surprisingly reminiscent of stuff that was in level 1. It described basic call and auction markets to start things off, then got into your standard valuation theories, with a couple new ones too that were no more complicated, in my opinion. At the tail end of 11, Dividend Growth Model and Gordon Growth Model came up again, and there was nothing in those readings that struck me as different from what I saw in level 1, aside from maybe something called the H model, (a type of GGM). CAPM, of course, came up on a few pages too. The new valuations, (that weren't in level 1) are Residual Income, and Free Cash Flows (both Equity and Debt), and possibly some other less significant ones that I'm forgetting about. None of them are brain busters, and don't get messy like the derivatives and even fixed income stuff did in level 1. They're just formulas that are pretty much plug and play. Overall, equity materials in this book are very understandable and not messy at all.

I think Derivatives and Fixed Income have the potential to be brain busters with messy math and awkward formulas, (Derivatives more than Fixed Income though). For now, I'm gonna try to finish Equities and also Alternative Investments (SS 13) by Saturday night so that I can have Sunday to go back and look at stuff I forgot from earlier. That, or I may just lay back, enjoy few shots of fine cuban rum, and then shoot myself in the face with a nicely sized shotgun. I'll play it by ear though.

Visiting my mom in US of A

Today is April 1st; Good Friday. If you're a christian, that's a day of fasting cept for fish at dinner, and probably some kind of other rituals I'm not familiar with. For me, it's a paid day off work, and an opportunity to head down to the states and visit my mother.

I'm still on Study session 11, and according to the Stalla callendar, I should be on study session 14, so technically, I am 2-3 weeks behind (13 is a tiny study session). I don't feel that far behind because I was pretty thorough on my first run through, without exception. I'll explain a little further about why I'm comfortable (though not exstatic) about the progress I've made so far:

I mentioned that I'm doing word documents for every Stalla reading, and that those tended to be between 2500 and 3500 words or something like that. I've had a couple come in at just over 5000 and even 5500 words now. As I've been reading, I wouldn't move forward until I was sure I understood what I just read. I don't necessarily remember the stuff 3 weeks later, but having already learned it, all I need is a little bit of time with the material and some questions, and I'll be back up to speed really quickly.

On my flight to Cincinnati (from Toronto, that's where I live), I thought I would try some review; I opted to go with quantitative methods, since it's been a pretty long time since I looked at that one. Reading 11 is the core for Quant in level 2; you won't understand squat in the 12th and 13th readings if the 11th one doesn't make sense to you (I emphasize that I'm talking about individual readings now, not study sessions). In my notes for 12 and 13, I noticed I was referring back to the 11th study session a lot, and being the careless twat that I am, I forgot to print my study session 11 notes. Oops. I was pretty tired on that flight, and ended up just sleeping after skimming through both 12 and 13. I think next weekend I'll have a big review session of as much of what I've learned to date as possible. The goal for this weekend is to finish study session 11 off, and get started on the 12th. By next weekend I hope to be done the 12th, and starting up on that review session.

FYI, to anyone reading this, don't go to Cincinnati, it sucks, it's boring, and it's super old-school christian. I don't care for religion much and I tend to have very liberal social views, so for me especially it's not my kind of place. I do like reminding people that Obama is president though, that puts a smile on my face because a lot of them are very republican and still living in denial about that. It's just about 4 pm now, and I'm going out for dinner/drinks with a local buddy of mine at 9 or so. I'm going to rub Obama's presidency in his face a lot, I expect it to bother him a lot. I hope to get in an actual western style fist fight with him by the end of the night. Fingers crossed.