David Hetherington, CFA discusses what you can expect and how we will prepare you to pass the CFA Level III Exam. This in depth full day workshop will supply you with all the tools necessary to confidently pass the exam.
Q2 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc
CFA Level III Essay Writing Workshop
Transcript
Everybody on David Hetherington I'm a charter holder. I actually started as a portfolio met while I started actually as an analyst first an equity analyst moved into portfolio management eventually a director of fixed income spent 20 years on the practitioner side of the investment business and I've been involved with CFA instruction even starting back in those days. I've been 20 years purely as an exam instructor putting material together coaching people how to pass this exam. It's a fascinating exam process. Level 1 was factoids Level 2 were long processes Level 3 write blank paper choose what you're going to say choose your words rightly be succinct. Very very different skills so it's a lot of fun to help people get through this process. The institute's very clear. The problem with the with the exam at level 3 for most candidates is the morning which is when they do the constructed response more informally called Esai. People don't know what they're supposed to do. They have ideas from college. That's not what they're looking for. The Institute talks about things like specificity. They give you a question they give you a set of case facts. They know what the body of knowledge is in their mind. There's a very clear set of issues that should show up in your answer and they grade whether they are there. So you're not creating information you're not spinning possibilities you're taking information you're converting it to an answer. And if you know how to do it the answer is pretty well-defined.
So we actually just finished up one of our one day question writing workshops where we take people and coach them on that. So what we do is we take old exam questions that removes any possibility at all they wouldn't ask it that way. They would be clear. Sometimes they are sometimes they're not but what they always do is they gave you enough information that you could have solved this problem. It may not have been the information you expected. Sometimes they throw a curveball at you but just remember they always gave you whatever you needed. You read the question again. You look at the information it leads you to an answer. So we've just basically spent almost eight hours doing exactly that. Working through old questions we start out with we coach. We show you what you should have thought about. We read through the facts. We identify what's important. We talk about how you would use it. Then we let you practice writing the answer. We also use. Here's the question. You read it. You answer it. Then we go through and we look at the answer. We look at what a good solution looks like. What were the critical things to include in the answer. How much you really need to write good rule of thumb. A good answer. The kind of answer you would give on the exam. You could write it in about 40 to 50 percent of the allotted time. The rest of the time read the information. Think about what you're going to say and then begin to write it down. So it is up it's like Level 2. There's a process here.
If you know how to do it it's not that bad. If you're not aware of how to do it it really is very difficult to get where they want to go they give you one simple example. One of the worse questions for many people is an individual investment policy statement question. It shouldn't be. You read the case. It's going to have given you information about what the client wants. Step 1. What if they ask you to do that they're going to ask you to make a calculation something about what rate of return you need are. That's easy. Start with how much money they have to work with. That's called the investible base. Everything you need to know is there we go back where they gave you these numbers we put them together.
