From the category archives:

CFA

Snowed In

by Russell on February 6, 2009

Today was a typical day in my new, post Barclays life, in Devon.

Having fed the dogs their breakfast of Weetabix (don’t say anything), I sat down at my computer at 08:30. I had neglected my CFA studies for a couple of days this week so decided to catch up on Session 4, Private Wealth Management. This comprises readings on

  • Managing Individual Investor Portfolios – using situational profiling and psychological profiling to create a meaningful Investment Policy Statement
  • Excerpts from Investment Management for Taxable Private Investors – understanding tax implications – now I prefer death to taxes
  • Multiple Asset Locations – how the wealthy avoid tax through various vehicles such as GRATs, GSTs, CTs, VLIPs, Foundations and Intergenerational Transfers
  • Low-Basis Stock – about the emotional attachment and letting go as entrepreneur becomes an executive and then finally an investor in his own business
  • Goals-Based Investing: Integrating Traditional and Behavioral Finance – setting understandable, meaningful and tangible goals for the client
  • Life-Cycle Investing – about how level of wealth supersedes age in setting risk objectives: the wealthy, at any age can invest aggressively while the not wealthy (poor) should always take a conservative approach (i.e no lottery tickets)
  • Human Capital, Asset Allocation, and Life Insurance – human capital seemed to be defined as the present value of total future earnings potential and hence declines from start of working life until retirement

At lunchtime I walked the dogs..

From Snowed In

In the afternoon I was doing some website updates for a client who wanted to launch a new pricing scheme that required Worldpay Remote Administration so I was doing some prototyping to check it out. It seemed a little insecure but use of PHP CURL to perform the updates should minimize risk.

$ch = curl_init();

$data = array(‘instId’ => ’123321′, ‘authPW’ => ‘guessMe’,
‘futurePayId’ => ‘$futurePayId’, ‘op-adjustRFP’ => ”, ‘amount’ => ‘$amount’);

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, ‘https://select.worldpay.com/wcc/iadmin’);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, $data);

$response = curl_exéc($ch);

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CFA Studies : Ethics and Professional Standards

by Russell on January 25, 2008

Okay, the clock is running down for the CFA Level 2 exam in June. This week I have been focussing on Ethics. Key Learning points are:  6 principles and 7 standards.

PRINCIPLES

  • Act with competence, integrity and diligence (ACID)
  • Place Clients before Personal interests (PCP) 
  • Use reasonable care and exercise judgement (URCJ) – how you would address Reggie Perrin’s boss
  • Promote integrity of capital markets (PICM) – pick me – Shrek
  • Practice and Encourage Other to act ProfessionalLy and Ethically (PEOPLE)
  • Maintain and Improve professional Competence  (MIC)

 STANDARDS

  • Professionalism – know the law, operate within it and be objective
  • Integrity of Capital Markets – don’t use material non public info or manipulate the market
  • Duties to clients – be loyal, prudent, fair and choose suitably and be discreet
  • Duties to employers - loyal and tranparent on outside income and be an effective supervisor
  • Investment analysis – diligent, sound investing, clear disclosure, and distinguish fact from opinion
  • Conflicts of interest – disclose conflicts of interest and referrals, and prioritise transactions
  • CFA Membership – Maintain reputation and use CFA trade mark appropriately

I scored 35/40 on Concept Checkers and 14/18 for the 3 item sets

For the CFA Institute Soft Dollar Standards  and the Research Objectivity Standards the key is to remember what is REQUIRED and what is RECOMMENDED. There does not seem to be any underlying principles involved here that are useful in distinguishing so I think this is one to memorize.

I hope there is a question on New Prudent Investor vs Old Prudent Man.  The theme is consistent and clear here: total return instead of capital protection, risk management rather than risk avoidance, portfolio scope rather than individual investments, no product restrictions and duty of a trustee to delegate responsibility to an expert investment manager rather self-manage the fund. 

 Next week, Regression Analysis. I bet you can hardly contain yourself.

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