1 Month to Go!

Well, here is the reason I have not updated my blog for a while. I've been studying for the CFA Level 3 Exam which is on June 4th. The books on my desk represent the "Coles Notes" - type summerization of the mountain of actual study material.

I have been spending many hours sitting in front of this desk trying to ignore all the people enjoying themselves directly outside my window in the hot tub / swimming pool. The exam is a day long event where no material except a simple calculator and pens/pencils are allowed. That means a lot of memorization as well as understanding. The financial derivatives stuff is especially challenging. Who knew that when you do a simple mortgage on your house you are actually borrowing money and buying a call option that becomes more valuable as interest rates decline. Valuing that call option requires a monte carlo simulation of the path interest rates will take over the life of the mortgage to come up with the probability that you will refinance at a lower rate. And then we get into interest rate and currency swaps, swaptions, puts, calls, forwards, futures, etc. etc. that all make my head hurt. Thank goodness level 3 is the final one. I can't take another year of this stuff.

Well, besides studying and my day job, I have also been organizing a trip to Russia's Sakhalin Island for June 10-16. The trip should be very challenging from a mobility perspective for me but I'm up for it. I will be visiting the city of Yuzhno, shown in the map to the right. BP's operations are at the north tip of the island and the wells we are drilling are off shore in the sea of Okhotsk.

After the week long trip I will probably try and do some touring in Seoul or Tokyo if time permits. We shall see. I'm pretty stoked about the trip and the fact that the VP of Exploration for my Business Unit has offered to accompany Patricia and I on the trip. This will really help open doors and make my visit so much more interesting since he has been visiting the island since the 1990's and has many contacts.