L2 “Calculate” LOS Tally

I recently had a friend who is completely oblivious to the struggle that is the CFA exam and asked, “How math-y is it anyway?”. It brought up a good question that I hadn’t thought about in a while, which is how may LOS (Level II) actually ask you to calculate something (as a command word). Of course you have to analyze, interpret, estimate and so on, but I think this could help those of us who need to focus our studies on the more quant heavy areas. So I tallied them up. It’s prob important to remember that not all LOS are created equally (“calculate PBO” versus “calculate P/E” count for the same here!).

Total LOS with the command word “Calculate”: 91

Broken out by area (arranged from greatest to fewest):
Equity – 27
Quant – 12
Derivatives – 11
Corp Fin – 10
Port Mgmt – 8
Fixed Income – 7
Alt Inv – 6
Econ – 5
FRA – 5
Ethics – 0

Broken out by reading (Top 9)
Market-Based Valuation: Price and Enterprise Value Multiples (Reading 37) – 9
Discounted Dividend Valuation (Reading 35) – 8
Portfolio Concepts (Reading 57) – 7
Correlation and Regression (Reading 11) – 5
Currency Exchange Rates: Determination and Forecasting (Reading 14) – 5
Swap Markets and Contracts (Reading 54) – 5
Time-Series Analysis (Reading 13) – 4
Mergers and Acquisitions (Reading 29) – 4
Residual Income Valuation (Reading 38) – 4

The top 9 readings comprise over half of “Calculate”. My apologies in advance if I made any mistakes in the above tally. I don’t know if anyone will find this helpful, but I do know there are some readings I intend to revisit to I am not blankly staring on exam day 🙂