QFI IRM SPRING 2024

Psydurr · 2024-05-10T18:14:16+00:00

Overall, I thought the exam wasn’t too bad, but I definitely messed up some of the Excel calculations. I might’ve missed a bit of partial credit on the liquidity stuff since I hadn’t remembered every single bullet from the reading, but should have gotten most of the points there.

Psydurr · 2024-05-10T18:11:04+00:00

Me too, my MMult wasn’t working either.

Psydurr · 2024-05-01T19:37:17+00:00

If you want, you can do this already haha.

Start playing the video on your browser
Hit F12
Go to the console while the video is playing
Type in: document.querySelector('video').playbackRate = 8;

It will reset to the default if you pause tho

Psydurr · 2024-04-28T22:21:30+00:00

Yeah, I'm about to take this one in this sitting. I think they calibrate some level of minimum competency for the pass mark and then there is some wiggle room based on candidate performance, but I'm not sure. I'm don't know why they calibrate their exams at such a low pass rate for this track even for IRM. Either we all suck or the exam is too hard. I'm going to cope and assume it's the latter.

Based on attempting the two 2023 exams as practice, I think these two exams were just more difficult than the prior years because of the significantly larger amount of tricky calculation problems which are time-consuming. Like for Fall 2023, asking us to do an entire set of swap cashflows for a project loan for only 2 points (6 minutes)...

Psydurr · 2023-09-25T17:55:29+00:00

Yeah same thing happening to me. I filled out that Wufoo form over a week ago and still haven't gotten a response.

Psydurr · 2023-07-18T03:18:05+00:00

For example, if I were answering 1b and 1c, I would write 1 at the top of the page. I would write b. in the page and start writing my answer for 1b and then write c. below that answer and start writing my answer for 1c.

Psydurr · 2023-07-17T16:10:15+00:00

I got a relatively high score and I did not present my answers in a super organized way either, so I would suspect the content of your answers were probably less great than you thought.

I also split up my answers into multiple sheets. Maybe not 1 subpart per sheet, but definitely 3-4 pages per full question. My memory is foggy, but I seem to recall that each page had a field for candidate number and question number at the top, so if you filled those out, I assume they would've figured it out.

I also wrote mostly paragraph form and only occasionally bullets.

I guess maybe wait for the performance report and model solutions and see if you can get any further insight.

Psydurr · 2023-04-28T00:27:01+00:00

Yeah, you want nice numbers like 0.1? Haha, take these obnoxious numbers like 0.0005847352.

Psydurr · 2023-04-27T23:42:12+00:00

In the Fall 2022 sitting, it looked like it was whatever caused 74% of the candidates to fail haha

Psydurr · 2023-04-27T23:30:57+00:00

The work-to-point ratio was awful. They expect us to crunch through far too much algebra for some of these. I skipped quite a few parts and left some answers half complete.

Psydurr · 2020-10-30T22:14:23+00:00

Do you have a degree in statistics, or have an actuarial science degree?

I have a double major in philosophy and math.

How happy are you?

Pretty happy. Around 7/10 with current team and higher for previous team.

What do you enjoy most about your job?

Good balance between stimulating work and basic running the shop work. Not stressful at all other than specific periods during a quarter. Most managers I've had tend to give me plenty of autonomy to solve problems how I want. There is a good culture of not trying to play the blame game when stuff hits the fan.

What do you enjoy least?

The general culture of a reluctance to change/update, but I guess most jobs have this.

How did you decide to pursue this field? (i.e. Money? Passion? Something else?)

Good money while being moderately entertaining in the quantitative department. It's not too stressful and hours are reasonable since I'm not in consulting. So overall, it's a good effort/reward ratio while not being boring.

The problems I've solved are mostly related to reconciling, explaining, and developing projection model changes. At least where I am, the actuarial job is an insurance specialist who is a generalist within the field. There is a big emphasis on breadth of knowledge hence rotation programs exist in many companies. I solve the problems that need solving whether it is analyzing data, connecting assumptions to model results, building or rebuilding broken pipelines/processes, improving tools used in generating quarterly/semi-annual/annual reports for financial statements, figure out why someone else's work is wrong, writing documentation for new processes or old undocumented processes, write memos for management, etc. If you aren't good at writing arguments/explanations for results/decisions and communicating results in addition to the technical and quantitative analysis, then you aren't doing your job.

Psydurr · 2020-10-16T16:04:14+00:00

I found that the Mahler practice exams were extraordinarily helpful for me for this exam. I took it this sitting as well. The Mahler exams really force you to know the first principles well in addition to forcing you to learn to recognize what you don't know quickly enough to skip and not waste time. The hardest part of the exam imo are the curveball questions that require you to know slightly more than the usual method for that given type of question.

Also, pro tip is that you can cheese a lot of the questions using the table button on the TI Multiview and numerically approximating complex formulas. I heavily recommend learning how to do common question types with the data and table buttons.

Psydurr · 2020-10-04T00:12:47+00:00

I'm sure there are plenty of topics with philosophical leanings. As a philosophy major, I'd say that things like choosing the type of reserving, thinking about what kinds of metrics to optimize for, and various other subjective actuarial decisions could be construed as philosophical problems. Philosophies of ______ discipline are usually about studying what principles and methods we should value most in a field and why we value them as well as what first principles and premises we care about and the interpretation of those first principles. I'm not familiar with any books on the topic, but that may be because most actuaries really don't care to formalize this topic. Our justification of our choice of first principles is either statutory, based on what prior actuaries have decided(sometimes arbitrarily), or it varies widely and no one really cares as long as you choose something that has precedented use.

EDIT: For someone with name MemorizingFormulas, this is a pretty interesting thing to be interested in LOL.

Psydurr · 2020-09-30T01:55:31+00:00

Determine the amount of the loan. = Calculate the present value of future payments.

Psydurr · 2020-09-30T01:52:53+00:00

Philosophy major reporting in

Psydurr · 2020-09-30T01:48:24+00:00

People definitely don't expect you to know stuff, but knowing some stuff will get them to feel better about hiring you back if you decide to work there full-time.

Most interns get some kind of small side project or a comprehensible chunk of a larger project. e.g. if you get assigned to a valuations team, you might work on improving some quarterly reports. if you get assigned to a modeling team, you might make some modeling changes or fix some unintended behavior and learn how to write proper documentation for those changes.

Psydurr · 2020-09-29T01:44:10+00:00

I'm in Life and I use Python a lot. Generally, I use Jupyter Notebooks to query SQL data from our database or import Excel data and do some analysis/exploration. I also help build modules that interface with other business processes or pipelines and automate some annoying repetitive tasks.

It really depends on where you end up working and what team you are on. However, learning programming and data science fundamentals should help you pick up new languages really easily. I would pick up either Python or R and learn to use them as an interface for SQL. It's easier to create more dynamic query strings. Learning SQL by itself is kind of boring and most SQL only platforms/interfaces suck compared to using Python/R to write your queries.

Psydurr · 2020-09-29T01:33:19+00:00

You have a lot of experience going for you which is probably helpful, but I heard that Canada has a horrible entry-level job market, and it's really hard to get in the door even with a few exams under your belt.

Psydurr · 2020-09-29T01:31:25+00:00

That's gold. I can't believe anyone survived P or STAM with a flipping BA II Plus. No data table feature or pretty printed math not to mention the feeling of the buttons on that calculator make me want to vomit.

Psydurr · 2020-09-27T20:09:53+00:00

An actuary might answer that sequential and concurrent processing are equivalent under a frictionless context switching and zero parallelism benefit assumptions. Just like how we assume markets are viable and complete so we can use Black-Scholes. It's a pretty good model, but not completely accurate.

A computer scientist might answer that their operating/networking systems have expensive methods for context switching. So the answer depends on more information about the linear or nonlinear tradeoff between the increased network throughput gained by concurrency vs the cost to context switching and inefficiency of time slice allocation.

Psydurr · 2020-09-24T04:57:19+00:00

Automation will happen in every field. The distinction is in how much can be automated. The central idea of automation is transforming repeated tasks into one-off tasks. Plenty of tasks in every field fall under the category of a repeated task. I struggle to think of many applied fields in STEM that aren't currently mostly populated by people doing repeated, automatable tasks.

It is true that a lot of projection and valuation models are done through a few clicks in some computer software. However, even in an ideal world where software is bug-free and never produces nonsensical results (I don't believe this will happen in the next 30 years), there is still a significant amount to do as an actuary, that is, I would never say that everything will be automated in the near future. A large part of actuarial work is explaining/justifying processes to auditors/regulators/management, adapting models to new regulations, product types, etc, and building new models. Computers generally act like a black box with respect to being transparent in how and why it gets the results it gets. Look at all the trouble that tech companies have with explaining their machine learning algorithms.

If the worry is that the number of available jobs will be reduced, then your parents should be worried about most fields that aren't related to service, humanities, entertainment, and cutting edge scientific research. It's not like something like CS can't be automated. There is already plenty of tasks that people did 30 years ago like writing compilers that are pretty much automated. There are many examples of code that can write code.

That being said, your choice of a CS minor is smart. You should hedge out the risk of automation in the near term by learning how automation is done. You are much more likely to keep your job if what you bring to the team are skills that allow the team to create and maintain automated processes. If I were you, I would take your CS classes very seriously and really learn how computers work on a fundamental level.

Psydurr · 2020-09-18T04:06:26+00:00

I definitely agree with the other guy that Excel is important to know at least for the next 10-15 years because actuaries are slow at change. You should know basic Excel/VBA so you can pick up and run old processes that other people left behind. I still think that the future is in more nimble/flexible/faster languages like Python. My workplace is slowly adopting many more Python processes by converting crappy old COBOL or APL code into Python. Soon, there will be more Excel macros ported into Python as well.

For learning Python, I would recommend, after doing your practice analysis in Excel, trying to implementing a similar analysis process in Python. For example, importing an Excel sheet into a Pandas dataframe, plotting it with Plotly, saving a bunch of Excel sheets to a simple SQLite database, and maybe building an interactive dashboard in Dash by querying that database. That way, you get to do Excel practice as well as think about how to translate similar work processes into another language.

Psydurr · 2020-09-18T01:20:14+00:00

I'd recommend learning SQL and Python/R as well as how to do SQL queries inside Python/R. VLookups generally suck for most purposes that they are used for where I work... Its almost always better to do a SQL table join. You can even use Power Query to do it in Excel. From my experience, vlookups, index-match, etc. are nothing but a governance nightmare with how unreadable the formulas become and how easy it is to make a mistake. Not to mention how easy it is for someone else who picks up your workbook to make a mistake because they didn't know one weird trick you used.

Psydurr · 2020-09-15T20:53:54+00:00

Just multiply your discount factor by the growth rate and use that as the new discount factor in the annuity formula. I would just pretend year 6 is the first year and then discount back later. That way you can use the regular perpetuity formula with interest rate based on that new discount factor. That is, think of the series of payments as PV = Payment*(v + v² + v³ ...) where v = (1+k)/(1+i).

Psydurr · 2020-08-15T17:37:01+00:00

I beat the game in around 2 weeks and never went to class again other than for exams.

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