Study Plan - What Do You Think?

[Backwardation]

Hi everybody,

I'm going to do the Part I exam in May and have some questions regarding my study plan:
My background: I have a Bachelor and Master Degree in Banking and Finance and covered a lot of the FRM Syllabus (especially Financial Instruments and Risk Management) during the last 5 years of my studies. I had to learn big parts of Hull and Jorion for my BA and MA - degree and we had a lot of lectures like market risk, credit risk, operational risk, fixed income, options and so on.
During the past week I have done all available practice exams provided by GARP (2010, 2011, 2012, 2013). Without any specific preparation, I reached a score of 60%-70% doing it the first time. Interestingly, I performed pretty bad for the 2010 questions, reaching only 55% correct answers. (.. hoping that the exams are much like EWMA and Garch with exponentially decreasing weights of the practice exams xD)

This is my starting point for the next 2.5 months. I would see myself as an expert with respect to financial instruments (especially options, greeks, fixed income, hedging, duration etc.) and market risk concepts such as VaR. I'm also quite familiar with basic Portfolio Theory concepts such as CAPM.

Topics which will be in my focus during the next weeks are basic statistic concepts and probability theory, especially topics on hypothesis testing, regression analysis, basic probability theory, different distributions. So basically the questions on quantitative analysis.

Would you rather recommend the GARP literature on those topics or other notes such as BT, Schweser? Or would you focus on the questions of the practice exams and read literature covering those questions?

Do you have any further recommendations knowing my educational background or do you need any further information for advices?

Thank you in advance for all comments!

 

[ShaktiRathore]

I think both schweser and BT would suffice. If you want better understanding of covered concepts and want to learn more then you can go for other literature like ong, jorion and hull. Its better that you have already read these books and i would recommend to read more if you like otherwise. It would be nice to learn BT and schweser notes thoroughly and give them ample time rather thatn giving your energies to other materials. SO be focused and go ahead. If you have some buffer time in your preparation then go for reference books.Seeing your background i think you should not enough problems passing the exam provided you know basic math.

thanks

 

[Backwardation]

Hello ShaktiRathore,

thank you for comments. So I will focus on BT/Schweser Notes. Basic maths is not a problem and many exams I had during my studies were built upon this "calculator and formula"-method like it is used for the FRM.
I already know almost all formulas required for the exam. The only problem is that I had to change the calculator and I am really happy that I have already changed the calculator and now have 2.5 months to "get to know" the new Texas BA II plus. Otherwise this would have been a real problem. I still have problems to discount cash flows with this calculator xD

Do you know if the practice exams provided by BT are more difficult than thos provided by GARP?

Best Regards

 

[ShaktiRathore]

Hi,
cant comment whether the exams provided by them are difficult than garp. But certainly both would provide you with enough practice.

thanks

 

[David Harper CFA FRM]

Hi backwardation,

Do you know if the practice exams provided by BT are more difficult than those provided by GARP?

Yes, the majority are one or two notches more difficult than the exam, with some that literally apply the AIMs being clearly more difficult and/or time consuming, such that on average our questions are more difficult than the exam (although in many cases, it's more because they work a full AIM which implicitly combines two concepts, whereas the exam only has a few minutes per problem ... so a real exam question is often forced into writing a fragment of a concept merely due to the time element).

Thanks,

 

[RiskNoob]

I agree with the above from David - I solved all mock P1 exams from David from 2009 to 2012 last November - They were generally more difficult than the one from GARP's while keeping the relevency(I was a Nov taker 2012).

Risknoob

 

[Backwardation]

Thank you for your answers.

After having worked through the sample questions of Jorion, Schweser and GARP (but not BT yet), I have the following feeling:

- Jorion: I would not say that all quesions are much easier than GARP oder Schweser questions. There are questions which are very easy, but there are also questions which I would assume to be relatively deep and tricky. Some questions are pretty similar to those provided by GARP.
- GARP: Doing the questions the first time, I reached an average score of 65% without specific preparation.
- Schweser: Going through the first practice exam (100 questions) very quickly (2 hours), I reached a score below the 65% of the GARP questions and also hat the feeling that the Schweser questions were more tricky. I would assume them to be not that easy as I often read... maybe they increased the degree of difficulty and trickiness this time?

Kind Regards!