CFA CFA Level 2 L2 “Calculate” LOS Tally

L2 “Calculate” LOS Tally

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    • Avatar of JimJim
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        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 🙂

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        Thanks for sharing @Jim‌ ! A good way to answer your friend’s question certainly. And also points out to common weak spots in Quant, Derivs and Equity sections.

        How’s studies coming along?

      • Avatar of JimJim
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          FRA has a lot of “Explain” commands, which can be tricker (at least to me) than calculating for that section (e.g. explain how increasing X affects financial statements/ratios).

        • Avatar of TimBCanadaTimBCanada
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            Wow yes that is good to know! I would think in FRA there would maybe be a different trigger word than ‘calculate’, but in the end it would be a numerical solution to numerical inputs that it is looking for. Not a big difference, but maybe just because there isn’t a simple 1-step formula they don’t use the word calculate as often in that section. In any event even 91 calculations is quite a few!

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