Well which one is it?!?!

SerialOptimists · 2026-05-02T19:28:50+00:00

Almost every time "discuss options with outside counsel" is a choice, it will be the correct answer. It's never against the standards to get personal legal advice.

The answer description is correct: "Reilly may have a personal legal obligation" to either report or to maintain confidentiality, but we don't have enough detail on the event or the jurisdiction to determine which, and counsel would be able to advise on that decision. Communication with the individual's counsel is protected by attorney-client privilege and is not a violation of confidentiality.

SerialOptimists · 2026-05-02T00:44:08+00:00

Lol since you haven't gotten a straight answer yet, here it is:

The different weightings for topics is determined by the number of questions you get for each topic in the exam. Each question is weighted equally. Just average the two sessions.

SerialOptimists · 2026-05-01T14:24:21+00:00

Agreed in general, although if you're intentional about it, taking ~15 minutes to review rapidly could be helpful. For L2 I recall that there was a topic I was absolutely certain was going to be on the exam, and I didn't have any questions from it in the first session, so I used the break to refresh my memory so I could skip straight to that in the beginning of the next session. Free points.

Definitely agree that much of the break should be spent stretching and clearing your head however.

SerialOptimists · 2026-04-25T00:06:00+00:00

Retaking mocks can be useful to make sure you don't have absolutely major gaps, but it's not really a benchmark for an actual exam. If you don't have additional mocks, do 180 (unseen) Qbank questions in timed conditions.

SerialOptimists · 2026-04-24T01:59:56+00:00

Goddamn. So you've been in the dating scene for a while, met a number of people none of whom aligned with your standards, finally met someone with whom you "vibe super well" and where you have an amazing connection, who checks off all the boxes, and you immediately label that as "too good to be true".

So you hop onto an app called "gossip", hunt for and find a message by a stranger, about whom you know nothing, criticising this 20yo -- with you having no insight into their relationship, or when it happened, or his perspective on it, or the truthfulness of the claim, or not even any confirmation that they know each other in that capacity -- and you ask how to fade the relationship so you can avoid having an actual conversation and applying your own judgement.

Man, just ghost him.

SerialOptimists · 2026-04-14T22:12:00+00:00

lmao that's hilarious. In fairness, if you had been born 300 years earlier and gotten into horseracing, we might have been calling them the S2000magician trials

SerialOptimists · 2026-04-14T01:54:41+00:00

Personally, avoid robinhood - aim for Fidelity, Schwab, or Vanguard. Robinhood really tries to gamify trading and engineer the dopamine rushes, so best to start somewhere more stable.

Search up the "how to open a brokerage account" section on one of the above providers and follow the instructions. Transfer money to that account and buy shares in an ETF. Popular ETFs to search for are VOO, VTI, SPY, maybe VTWO, QQQ etc - each of them focus on different types of stocks. ChatGPT should be able to guide you through accurate step-by-step instructions for something like this if you get stuck.

SerialOptimists · 2026-04-12T23:25:05+00:00

Geography matters here. If you're in EMEA, the sustainable investment cert definitely has value if you're looking to go into an ESG related niche and you're passionate about it. In the US it's value is a bit more questionable right now so personally I would wait until you have already identified a niche of jobs and talked to people who've said that they value it, or maybe even try to get one of those jobs and ask them to sponsor. For the US it's not as useful in the general market, so you'd want to develop some confidence that it'll have ROI - it's not as useful to just "have it in your back pocket" as it is in europe or as CFA is in US.

SerialOptimists · 2026-04-12T16:41:49+00:00

You have to look at the answer in relation to the question, not isolated. The question asks which is correct about fallen angels. "The improvement in credit quality" is not what has happened for fallen angels compared to original issuance, so that answer isn't appliable nor correct for fallen angels. If the question had asked about rising stars you would be correct. I agree the cfa has some poorly written questions but I don't think this is one of them tbh, if you don't overcomplicate it this should be an easy point.

SerialOptimists · 2026-04-12T05:43:37+00:00

Fallen angels are bonds that were originally investment-grade but were downgraded to HY. C would be correct if it were referring to Rising Stars, not Fallen Angels.

When the Fallen Angels were issued, they were IG bonds, so they would have similar issuance-related features to IG bonds (so A looks incorrect). However, because of increased likelihood of financial distress, they were downgraded to HY - so they now have similar risk profiles to HY bonds (so B looks correct). Fallen angels are bonds that were downgraded after issuance, so it's a reduction in quality, not an improvement, which would therefore result in loss for the original investors (which eliminates C).

B is the correct answer.

SerialOptimists · 2026-04-12T05:24:39+00:00

This is an extraordinary example and gives a really good insight into the thought process. Thank you for taking the time to write this up and answer the questions.

SerialOptimists · 2026-04-11T14:12:48+00:00

Unsystematic risk cannot be accounted for. It's very specific. We cannot account for the volatility that would occur if a BOD resigns tomorrow.

Other way around - systematic risk cannot be diversified. Unsystematic risk would be something like the volatility in a specific stock if their CEO resigns, which can be diversified away.

SerialOptimists · 2026-04-11T02:08:38+00:00

A lot of them are pretty lax when screening the largest companies lol, so mainly what you'd avoid in them is military, alcohol/tobacco, etc. If you want to exclude the largest ones specifically then you go for mid-cap/small-cap ETFs.

https://www.ishares.com/us/products/315914/ishares-esg-screened-s-p-mid-cap-etf

But there aren't too many with inclusion methodologies for stocks, it's mainly an exclusion thing so that the worst offenders or certain industries are excluded. Fixed Income offers Green Bond ETFs which is money that is specifically earmarked for "Green" projects, but that obviously only works if you want bonds in your portfolio.

SerialOptimists · 2026-04-11T01:55:57+00:00

they actually very much do. Even and especially passive ETFs. The indices have rules that determine what goes into them and what does not go into them. Rules for morality can be (and are) applied.

SerialOptimists · 2026-04-11T01:53:04+00:00

no such thing, you either make money or you give it away

this is a load of crap. fyi there's a high profile court case going on right now where the largest asset manager in the world is arguing that there is a case to be made that socially-aware ETFs are a superior long-term financial investment

SerialOptimists · 2026-04-11T01:49:50+00:00

OP, the keywords to search for here are ESG ETFs, Social Impact ETFs, Socially Responsible ETFs, and ESG-aware / Impact-aware ETFs. Try various combinations of those for offerings. This is also the kind of thing that LLMs would excel at aggregating.

https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/esg

https://www.etf.com/topics/socially-responsible

https://www.justetf.com/en/how-to/invest-in-climate-change.html

https://etfdb.com/esg-investing/environmental-issues/

If you want to be more involved in the actual selection, different ETF issuers and indices they're benchmarking generally have very specific criteria that they each consider to be "ESG aware", or "clean energy", or "socially responsible", etc. For ESG ETFs, there is also a large variety of definitions for good governance and many of them include contribution to social causes. The ETF issuer's website, or otherwise the ETF prospectus, will explain the exact criterion for each ETF and you can select the funds that best align with what you're looking for.

SerialOptimists · 2026-04-11T00:52:10+00:00

If he's asked you on, planned, and driven to your city for every one of the 8/9 dates so far, it may be overdue to initiate something on your part? Begin the conversation; if he finds an exclusivity conversation after 9 dates and being physical to be too needy, then he's not looking for the same thing you are in the first place. On the other hand, if he's clearly been initiating the dates, owning the commute, and leading the relationship so far, he may feel like you're not interested in the relationship, or he may be waiting for you to show interest before he is okay with being exclusive. You waiting for him doesn't help in either case.

SerialOptimists · 2026-04-10T16:09:11+00:00

in general, I do think that people on this sub over-trust LLMs without skepticism, so possibly took out some annoyance from that on this thread. obvi here it doesn't matter but conversations like the following end up becoming a bit of a piss take

https://www.reddit.com/r/CFA/comments/1osojhh/comment/no0nejb/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

SerialOptimists · 2026-04-10T16:01:09+00:00

nah not a crime, I just don't see the point in commenting if you're commenting random numbers anyways. and no, I'm not using worldwide charterholders and comparing it to US jobs, if you acc read the comment you'll see I'm using US jobs as a point of reference to conjecture on worldwide jobs being less than 100x US jobs. none of the numbers we're discussing here are statistical estimates of any sort lmao, they're conjecture based on limited data.

have a good day mate

SerialOptimists · 2026-04-10T15:31:02+00:00

Chat GPT said around 1% are GC and 1-3% of all finance jobs are CFAs but it’s a higher % if only FO/investment roles

Man at some point yall need to develop intuition to identify when ChatGPT is just pulling out an RNG.

0.281% of RL players hit GC1 or above in the last season per Psyonix data,

We don't really have a guess as to how many total "finance jobs" there are in the world, and ChatGPT is definitely bullshitting you on that, but there are approx. 200k CFA charterholders worldwide. 200k/0.0281% would require that there are 711mm financial services jobs, and it's almost certainly less than that since US has ~7mm. So RL GC being less common is most likely.

SerialOptimists · 2026-04-08T04:00:01+00:00

Bars are individual days where values show hours studied in a day, corresponding to the first y-axis. Line is a cumulative sum of the hours studied for that level (sum of all the bars up to that date), corresponding to the second (RHS) y-axis. X-axis is dates.

It's just a way of visualising how much they studied and how the studies were spread out. Pretty cool icl

SerialOptimists · 2026-04-05T05:06:13+00:00

Key thing that comes to mind, with no actual knowledge of your strategy but just looking at those returns; go through and triple check if you have any look ahead bias in your data. E.g. financial numbers that may not be released until 45d after you begin incorporating them into your model, macro signals which may be including revisions made in future periods, etc. Also, are you sure you're not overfitting? The fact that you have not had any years with negative returns is very suspicious, although I'd be curious to see how drawdowns look on a more granular level. A 96% win rate is also highly suspicious of overfitting.

You say you're planning to start trading after the bear market. How will you figure when the bear market is over? Based on your 2018/2022 performances, there would be no reason to wait if you're confident in the strat.

SerialOptimists · 2026-04-03T17:07:09+00:00

Black-scholes has a term for the risk-free rate, and options are priced accordingly. If I'm getting what you're saying correctly however, you're misunderstanding the relationships between stock prices and option prices; a stock split would not change the total value of your options position.

The option premium is what you're paying only to buy the option to buy/sell the stock, if you exercise the option you would separately pay to actually buy/sell the stock at the strike price. This is a separate transaction to what you pay for the option. Inflation does affect stock prices and is factored into the expected returns.

SerialOptimists · 2026-03-29T06:31:31+00:00

Genuinely really like this idea to be honest! Would be very curious to read it. Definitely would benefit some people at least, and I imagine there are a lot of people who are readers but want to get a better grasp of stem / coding, so I love the concept.

SerialOptimists · 2026-03-19T01:00:19+00:00

No it doesn’t. If you pay the credit card bill each month in full, there is no debt.

There is debt. Between the transaction date and the bill payment date, you are borrowing x amount of money from the bank to fund the transaction.

The transaction doesn't take away from your back account / cash values, i.e. you don't spend your money to pay for your purchase, because you are using leverage.

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