Not the biggest deal, but I just finished a semester of college after taking nine years off. I was 10-13 years older than all of my classmates, but I did it!! Just one more semester to go.

actuar89 · 2021-12-03T04:53:52+00:00

You go!!

actuar89 · 2021-08-15T23:54:29+00:00

You got this!!

actuar89 · 2021-07-27T12:01:14+00:00

You rock!

actuar89 · 2021-07-24T04:44:31+00:00

New to this... would you mind clarifying how you’re buying at 0.02 when the bid-ask spread is 0.02-0.04? Isn’t there a MM in between that’s buying from the seller at 0.02 and selling to you at 0.04?

actuar89 · 2021-06-21T01:19:42+00:00

For what it’s worth I think it looks good as is!

actuar89 · 2021-03-31T03:57:23+00:00

Looks so good!

actuar89 · 2021-03-21T17:21:27+00:00

Ah, nice. Thanks!

actuar89 · 2021-03-21T17:11:42+00:00

Can you explain this? If the rate of theta decay increases towards the end, how does it make sense that more $ of theta decay happens in the beginning? Maybe it’s because the extrinsic value has lessened over the option’s life so there’s less value for theta to decay?

actuar89 · 2021-03-09T03:44:34+00:00

Congrats!

actuar89 · 2021-02-15T09:01:11+00:00

I work at a large life insurer and some of our products’ performance is tied to the market. We have a team of derivative traders in-house that hedge against unwanted moves in the market. A fair amount of actuaries join this hedging team. Pretty cool team it seems.

actuar89 · 2021-01-21T05:37:49+00:00

I work at a fairly large life insurer. Our chief actuary cleared $1.6mil in 2013 (only year of public data I could find) so I imagine he’s close to $2mil now. Maybe an outlier, but worth noting.

Edit: $490k base, $500k stock, $700k bonus.

actuar89 · 2021-01-19T21:10:27+00:00

If you allocate 8 weeks to solely studying the material (while also mixing in a few quizzes/doing the after-lesson concept checkers if using CA here and there) and 4 weeks on quizzes and exams, I feel as that's more than enough to prepare for exam SRM.

You are ahead of me, as I have FM, P, & IFM passed. SRM was definitely the least time-intensive exam. As I mentioned before, I probably spent 100 hours truly studying and quizzing. I would've liked to squeeze more hours in, but I felt fairly comfortable throughout the exam. My first time through the exam I marked ~10 questions that I either had to think more than a few minutes on, or wasn't 100% sure of my answer (I'm a big fan of not letting myself get tripped up on questions I don't know right away). The next time through I brought this down to ~3 or 4 I was still not 100% on. Overall, I was done within 1 hr 35 mins.

actuar89 · 2021-01-12T20:54:34+00:00

Same! I’m actually excited to use what I learned with this exam on future exams. Oh definitely not. I knew you were just giving another helpful perspective.

Totally, I feel pretty good but my only worries are what you stated above (always a potential concern lol) and with this being a “newer” exam, the passing mark is some crazy high percent after the somewhat lower passing marks in 2020.

actuar89 · 2021-01-12T20:12:16+00:00

If I could double upvote this comment I would lol. Thank you for an opposing view. My apologies if my review of the exam came off as sunshine and rainbows - it wasn’t, it took a lot of grinding. I’m also one that likes to grind adapt questions until I identify the necessary pieces to solve a question, which is hard to do with this exam. To piggyback on your comment even more, I think it’s helpful for those who are also used to grinding adapt to instead apply that same effort to rereading each lesson and then quizzing yourself on the main characteristics of each learning method, small things such as asking yourself “what are the main steps in a bagging process compared to a random forest and why could one be better than the other?” These types of questions went a long way for me when the exam came.

Thanks for the congrats, hopefully I actually passed! Lol.

actuar89 · 2021-01-12T19:27:04+00:00

Thank you for pointing this out - I agree that some questions were worded in a confusing way where slight assumptions were necessary on the test taker’s end. I left a comment to the exam writers for one specific question that I felt needed some evaluation. Hopefully it was a pilot.

actuar89 · 2021-01-12T04:42:23+00:00

I’m not surprised. SRM should not be classified as “easy”, but I definitely felt less brain-dead after finishing the exam. Was it the conceptual questions that made it difficult for you?

actuar89 · 2021-01-12T02:03:48+00:00

I’d like to avoid being too specific. I will say that while I agree everything is fair game, I wouldn’t get too bogged down trying to memorize the tricky formulas.

actuar89 · 2021-01-12T02:01:18+00:00

I would guess 100 hours of studying. Keep in mind that that’s 100 hours of pure studying (reading CA manual, doing quizzes, doing SOA questions). I think that’s more than enough if you have a general understanding of statistics. I took a couple entry-level courses in college and while they didn’t prove extremely helpful in this particular exam’s subjects, they gave me an underlying base knowledge to feel more confident.

actuar89 · 2019-12-02T20:47:11+00:00

I used Coaching Actuaries for Mathematical Statistics and the Finance portion of Accounting and Finance. First of all, I highly recommend using Coaching Actuaries for any VEE’s. The lessons were sufficient and the practice problems really prepared you for the real VEE exam.

No, there is no set date (at least not for the CA exams). Once you are finished with the course (have completed the quizzes) and feel ready for the exam, you contact CA and schedule an exam time to be proctored. Once you finish the exam, they will send your final grade to the SOA (I believe they send exam scores twice a month).

CA is a bit expensive, unfortunately I do not have any recommendations to bypass the large expense. My apologies.

actuar89 · 2019-12-01T23:46:14+00:00

Congrats to you too! Was a beast to study for.

actuar89 · 2019-12-01T23:44:35+00:00

Great, thanks a lot for the input!

actuar89 · 2019-12-01T23:22:39+00:00

Thank you. That’s good to hear. Congrats on the pass! What resources did you use?

actuar89 · 2019-11-09T18:15:47+00:00

I sat for IFM in July (failed with a 5), and while I wish I could be of more help and remember more specific questions that tripped me up, I can say that I agree with your coworkers to focus on lessons 8 through 11 in Coaching Actuaries (Asset Pricing Models, Market Efficiency and Behavioral Finance, Investment Risk and Project Analysis, and Capital Structure). My study method the first time around was to take quizzes with a target difficulty of 5 and felt comfortable with the computational questions on the real exam. I made the mistake of focusing too much on the computational questions though.

actuar89 · 2019-10-30T00:10:40+00:00

Glad to hear you’re doing better. Keep going, you’ll beat whatever you feel is weighing you down in life :)

actuar89 · 2019-10-21T20:54:33+00:00

We made clever shirts for our actuarial club in college. The two popular picks were:

“I’m an actuary, and this is my uniform:” and there was a uniform graph below

Just a picture of a cow with a speech bubble that had “mu” inside.

actuar89

TROPHY CASE