Sunday, 26 February 2012

Footnotes in the Curriculum

All the candidates who have appeared in the Level II exam I have come across, so far, say one thing in common. There is nothing which you can take risk of leaving assuming it wont be tested! Does the same go for footnotes provided in the CFA Curriculum? I don't exactly know its answer but normally when I am in a flow and reading any topic from the curriculum, unfortunately I skip the footnotes. May be their font size is so small or the subscript appears 'unimportant' while reading or may be it act as an obstacle in the flow which makes me feel uncomfortable with going through the footnotes while reading from the curriculum. Moments earlier I was going through Reading 40 from my Finquiz curriculum notes. When I reached the heading 5, I saw the formula of Excess Cash = Total Cash Available - (total assets of firm x (median level of industry cash / median level of industry total assets)). The curriculum was also open in front of me and my eyes rolled to heading 5 and the formula wasn't written there. To my surprise I started reading from the curriculum and was rather worried to figure out that the formula was explained in the footnote! It took me away as I have covered more than 50% of the syllabus and consistently I had been ignoring the footnotes whenever I referred to the curriculum. Thanks to my notes which contain all the important information available in the footnotes so that one may not skip it. The relevance and importance of information provided in the footnote with exams perspective is unknown to me but considering how crucial is the exam, I just can't take the risk of missing anything...

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