5 Million Dollars. 10 Years. This is the story of my journey.
I just finished re-reading AI when I looked out of my window and saw this: My lousy photography skills (ha ha! what skills?) totally don’t do justice to the picture, but somehow I feel more peaceful. Even though I don’t have 100% confidence in passing, I kinda have a perspective that failing this exam in [...]
I just took the Sample Exam for L2 and I had to say I failed miserably. The interesting thing was that I also failed the L1 Sample Exam miserably… but I scored 10/10 > 70% in the actual exam. How’s that for correlation Here, take a look. And I’d taken the L1 sample exam even [...]
As I’ve so shamelessly advertised a few days ago, I passed CFA Level 1 Exam with pretty good result (all sections > 70%). Now, a lot of people got this kind of result as well. Just look at the AnalystForum’s June 2009 Level 1 result thread. Some of them are probably a lot smarter than [...]
I’m VERY HAPPY to report that my learning strategies apparently worked!!! Obviously the big major humongous thanks go to: My wife, who’d been very patient with me for geeking out for many, many weekends, and was supportive through and through. My parents, who had been very supportive and were obviously very proud to hear that [...]
I’ve been going through the Corporate Finance practice questions, many of which are about calculating Weighted Average Cost of Capital (WACC), a.k.a.: Marginal Cost of Capital (MCC). The formula is simple: WACC = wd[kd(1 - t)] + wpskps + wcekce So just like its name, it’s basically a weighted average of the 3 capital components: [...]
I have to admit, I’m struggling with the Financial Reporting and Analysis (FRA, SS7 to SS10) part of CFA Level 1 curriculum. The available texts, both CFAI and Schweser, continue to read like Latin to me. The big problem is that FRA is not like Quants or Econs, whose concepts you can wrap your head [...]
In October 2008, I decided to register myself to take the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Level 1 Exam in June 2009. This exam is widely known to be a daunting challenge, with very low passing rate (after 2000, there hasn’t been a single year/half-year where the passing rate is higher than 50%). We don’t know the [...]
HP12c is so unloved. All CFA candidates I know seem to be using TI BAII Plus. Schweser Notes even says it right out: “If you don’t already own a calculator, go out and buy a TI BAII Plus!” If you see the examples in Study Session 2 of the Schweser Notes, it’s full of sentences such [...]
As I mentioned in my previous post, not all chapters are created equal. I’ve decided to prioritize my schedule accordingly. Consequently, I have to update my plan as well. You can see the latest version here. Also, I’ve created a Google group for our email study group for June 2009 Level 1 exam. Please feel [...]