Understanding Your Financial Calculator

Understanding Your Financial Calculator

As you may already know, there are only two types of calculators allowed for CFA Exam:

Hewlett Packard: HP 12C

Texas Instruments: TI - BA II Plus


If you have not made a choice yet, save yourself some time/headache and go with Texas Instruments. I have not used HP Calculator, but reading reviews by others and from the instructions in this book, it is not quite good.

The books covers both calculators permitted for CFA Exams. The book is very detailed and even explains basic operations like addition and multiplication etc. In my opinion it covers all the instructions for calculations you will ever need for Level I. I may be wrong, as I still have tons of material to read. Do you really need it? May be not. If you already bought Schweser material, it gives you instructions anyways. I am not sure about Stalla, but if you are planning to rely on any other material, this book will be useful. It is definitely more useful than the user guide that comes with the calculator.

If you are not planning on buying this book, there is a great website that gives you tips - TI BAII Plus Calculator Tips


I bought it directly from Schweser, and can't find it on Amazon.

Done with Ethics. Some thoughts about Quantitative Methods.

I have finally finished reading Ethics and Professional Standards from the CFA Curriculum material over the weekend. I have memorized all the Ethics and Standards and can recite them even in the middle of the night. It's actually more important to understand the guidelines rather than memorizing the Standards, but I wanted to put in some extra effort as this is a very important topic on the exam. It is also one of the easier topics for me. I did pretty well on the practice questions in the material.

The CFA Curriculum is divided into Study Sessions. Ethics and Professional Standards is in Study Session I and the curriculum material for this session is made available by CFA Institute free of charge. You can download the material for Study Session 1 from here.

It's been about 4 days since I started reading Quantitative Methods material and should say that it is very advanced. I thought this would be another easy topic for me due to my technical background and strong mathematical foundation. Although it is still mathematics, it has a financial element that we don't acquire in mathematics courses. I am reading one of the reference textbooks suggested by the CFA Institute and really like the book. The Quantitative Methods material is actually 2 Study Sessions and so I am giving myself until Jan 21st to complete this material. Most CFA class room instructors tend to give a week for each Study Session and I will follow that in my preparation.

CFA Fundamentals Paperback: 588 pages Publisher: Kaplan (Aug 2005) ISBN-10: 1419526820 ISBN-13: 978-1419526824

The book is very basic and prepares you well for all the material covered in Level-1. If you start preparing in Dec (or Jul for Dec Exam) then this might be a good book to start with. If you have any previous experience in Financial field, this book will be useless. You can pretty much skim all the pages in a weekend. I spent about 6 hrs and was able to finish couple of chapters.

I would recommend this book only to someone who doesn't have finance/business knowledge and has some extra time to prepare. Anyone regardless of their experience can do without this book.

I bought it directly from Schweser, but it might be cheap at Amazon or Ebay.

Book Review Procedure

The waiting is finally over, I plan to review atleast couple of books a week for until February. I want to rely totally on CFA Curriculum material and reference textbooks suggested by them. As you already know, I am from technical background and have nada knowledge of business and finance. The reviews will be particularly useful to those who are in my category. I will use the star system described below to review my books.

- Must Buy.

- Very useful for CFA curriculum.

- Very useful for fundamentals.

- Some topics were useful. But can get by without buying.

- Not at all useful. Do not buy.

Nouvelle année heureuse ! (Happy New Year !)

This is my first posting in 2007. Had a OK new year weekend. I wanted to complete the "Ethical and Professional Standards" material, but hardly could lay my hands on the books. I had already completed standards I and II last week and read III and IV yesterday. I am positive that, I will be done with the standards and GIPS by this weekend. I have spent about 8 hrs so far on this material and really it isn't hard... just a lot of stuff to memorize. I have purchased Schweser's "Understanding Your Financial Calculator" and "CFA Fundamentals" books and they arrived over the weekend. I went through couple of chapters and thought they were too basic. I wasted about $80 and don't think they are worth it. The reference textbooks that I bought should be good enough although it might have taken a little more time to grasp. Anyway, since I already bought the books from Schweser, I have planned to read them before starting other LOS. So, I will read these books after I am done with "Ethical and Professional Standards" material. Look for detailed reviews on these books and the material I used for "Ethical and Professional Standards" as well.

Exam Introduction ... and my first day of cramming...

Yesterday, I started my preparation for CFA Level-I. I have registered for Level I about 3 months ago, but only skimmed thru a few books so far. The sooner you register the cheaper the exam fee is. You have to become very comfortable with CFA Institute’s website. I have bought several referral books, which I will list as I read them. CFA Institute’s bookstore sells it’s own curriculum material as well as several other reference books from other publishers. The Institute also publishes a study session outline document that clearly specifies the Learning Outcome Statements (LOS) for each subject. You can see the subject area focus for Level-I in the pie chart at the end of this article. The first book in the CFA Curriculum – “Ethical and Professional Standards” is available for free download from their website. This subject constitutes about 15% of the exam … which makes it very important. I have skimmed this book before and have already memorized all the Code of Ethics and Standards of Professional Conduct. I have spent about 4 hours yesterday going through the guidelines and examples of a couple of the standards. I have five more standards to finish reading and then there is a new LOS on Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS). My experience so far is that the material for Ethical and Professional Standards is huge and we need to quickly understand and memorize some of the key statements. One doesn’t need a business or finance background to assimilate the material but in the examples you will hear a lot of roles/terms in the investment management (IM) and investment banking (IB) sector and has actually helped me understand the differences between buy-side vs sell-side etc. I really liked the Ethics and Standards and wondered why all industries don’t have such standards. Most of the time even the most ethical people go by their instincts and sometimes they may be wrong, instead if there were such standards say in technology industry, construction industry, not to mention the airline/credit card/cellular customer service ….they would know exactly what to do. Ofcourse it is still your responsibility to be ethical and practice the standards.

Qui suis-je? (Who am I?)

I was recently selected as Time's Person of the Year. Well technically, everyone who ever used internet was named as the Person of the Year. After reading the stupid article, I did some googling and found that I am in the company of Ayatollah Khomeini, Adolf Hitler and our beloved president George W Bush (actually twice!!). Now, not many people think that is a great group to be included in, do they? And do you how this tradition of "Person of the Year" started? - It is believed that the Time Editors came up with this idea during a slow news week in 1927. Well, it is a great idea but they should have also come up with a set of rules and standards.

Anyway, Who am I? I tried to answer in a single sentence, but it's impossible. Let me introduce myself by saying that I work in the Technology Sector and knocking on 30.. Oh My God!!! I feel like one of my feet is already in the grave. I live in Chicago with my beautiful/loving/caring wife (Just trying to be nice... if she ever discovers who this CFA_Blogger really is?). Many would consider my career as successful and I am proud of it, but I don't feel my work as challenging anymore. I always wanted to do an MBA and have been playing with that idea for quite a while now. I did lot of research and concluded that full-time MBA from a top-tier university is the way to go, if I wanted to change careers. I have also noticed that CFA is a great designation to have along with an MBA, if I wanted to work in the financial sector. I am not going to discuss how or if I will get admitted to a top-tier MBA university, but I have strapped my seat belts and begun my journey to CFA and MBA. I may or may not be able to change careers at the age of 33-34 (when I will be hopefully done with CFA and MBA...), but that aside, it will be a great achievement in itself if I fulfill that goal.

Why this blog? You must be thinking I am crazy to have such lofty goals and wasting all my time on the internet writing stories about myself. There are three reasons why I started this blog. Firstly, there is very little information online about personal experiences of CFA Candidates. All we hear is that CFA is too tough to crack and blah .. blah ... blah... So I wanted to convey my experiences as I go thru each stage of it. Secondly, I thought it would be a great tool to motivate me to stick to my schedule and post something new everyday. Lastly, you must have already noticed that I lack writing skills. Stick with me and I will improve my writing skills along the journey and will make it one heck of a ride.