if ... investment, innocent, concepts, believe, perfect

AnalystAlan

I find the CFAI intentionally writes exams controdicting to those exam prep courses, which is fine if they try to make a point that you should read their text books.
but, what's the point of having an exam that hardly tests any of these core concepts heavily used by investment professionals on a daily basis?
and with regards to the ethics, coming up with totally imagined perfect wishful-thinkings that do not exist in the REAL world, and forcing our innocent exam takers to believe and abide them are totally meaningless.
if you ask me to read your textbooks, i ll read your textbooks, but just don't write exam questions for the sake of testing weather one has read your books cover to cover.
also, use straight, plain english, refine the wording, let us know what you are trying to test! after all, this is an exam to test one's understanding of the concepts of financial and investment analysis, not the ability to detect your tricks!
suck a fraudulent exam!
and if they continue to do so, we ll just study the concepts and topics neglected by those prep courses, and pass the exams easily, but what's the point? none would understand anything about valuation, financial analysis!

oh, and i m pretty sure the analyts' tickets and meals and luxury hotels will be paid by a hosting companies, and the analyts will be happily accepting them!

and they ll just that lucky to meet one of these big head CEOs in a CAFE shop!

Write smarter questions!

yalo

Agreed. Need to be close to more realistic scenarios

WarrenB1

i heard ppl complaining aboout this a lot, so, let's hear your real thoughtS here.

FinancialAnaly

Here's a good ethics question you won't see:

Analyst A works for a sell-side shop. His bank gets all the trading flow on XYZ and they did a few deals with XYZ so if you want to know what XYZ is telling analysts behind the scenes, you've gotta talk to Analyst A.

Analyst B works for a buy-side shop. Analyst B does generally good work but realizes that in the end, nobody cares whether his analysis was right or wrong - only that the market went in his direction when the quarterly #'s were released. So getting the right analysis is not as important to Analyst B as getting Analyst A's opinion is.

Analyst B calls Analyst A to discuss the fun times they had when the worked together at shop ZZZ. After chewing the leather for some time, Analyst B asks Analyst A "how his numbers are looking for the upcoming quarter."

Analyst A proceeds to discuss what everybody already knows about the earnings model that he has released into the community (which was important, because in order for his numbers to look relatively good, everybody else's guestimates need to approximate his). He then goes on to note that his numbers on figure "UMMM" were too high; he was "thinking about lowering them - maybe." Of course, figure "UMMM" represents a material input into the model and by changing it, Analyst A will be making a significant revision to his overall estimate.

Analyst B thanks Analyst A for his time, then proceeds to call Analysts C, D, E, F....Z to inform them, in order of who helped him out the most in the past, of Analyst A's upcoming "changes."

Question: Spot the ethics violation.

Bonus Question: Approximate how close to a real-life situation this ethics example was, and how likely it will be that you ever see it on a test.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at Monday, June 7, 2010 at 04:23PM by cgeorgan.

random_walker47

cge, how many ethics you actually did to have written a fabulous question like that>?
lol

bolligerallstar

wait... are you reading out a scene from the upcoming movie Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps?

wxs1986

hummm, pondering.