Congrats to all those who didn't walk out after the first 15 minutes yesterday.  Now for the hard part, waiting for the results!  Good luck!

So, friends, I needed a break from the Quant readings.  I retreated to Fixed Income, a subject that I am familiar with given my current position at the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago.  As an investment credit analyst for the Bank, I run loan-level and deal level models in order to determine quarterly Other-than-temporary-impairment on our PLMBS holdings.  When I’m not modeling cash flows, I’m hunting down trustees who don’t calculate trust cashflows correctly.  SIDE RANT: These trustees and servicers are really getting sloppy.  I don’t care how many triggers are blown – You should be able to model these deals more accurately!

I am familiar with the most structures, so I took the opportunity to model some generic structures in Excel while following along in Reading 51 (See screenshot below).  Z-bonds were a little tricky, but I finally got the formulas to work.  That was the fun part.  I still have the end-of-the-reading questions to go through.  After that, I think I will see what the Allen TestBank can throw at me.  I’m not too worried about this section on the CFA Exam.  Let’s hope the next section is the same way!