In November I sat a full-length Level I mock. I had read the Schweser notes twice and felt, if not confident, then at least prepared. I scored fifty-eight percent. A passing mark, depending on whose estimate you trust, is somewhere between sixty-eight and seventy-four. I was sixteen points short with ten weeks to go.
The natural response was to study more. I doubled my hours. My second mock came back at sixty-one percent. My third, fifty-nine. I was not getting worse, which was the most troubling part — I was spending more time and producing the same result, which meant whatever I was doing was not working, and whatever I was doing was most of what prep books tell you to do.
So I did the most useful thing I have ever done as a student: I wrote down every question I had gotten wrong. Ninety-three of them. What I expected to find were ninety-three knowledge gaps — concepts I had not learned. What I actually found were about eleven patterns. I was confusing modified and Macaulay duration. I was plugging the wrong sign into net present value for outflows. I was treating yield-to-maturity like it was a return, when it is a discount rate. A handful of misconceptions were generating most of my errors, and the books had no way of finding them, because the books do not know what I, specifically, do not understand.
I sat for Level I in February and scored in the ninetieth-percentile band. The tool on this page is what I used to get there. I am not a smarter candidate than you are. I had a better feedback loop.
A ten-year bond has a modified duration of 7.3 and a convexity of 68. If yields increase by 75 basis points, the best estimate of the bond’s price change is closest to:
You selected +5.28%. The magnitude is right, which means the arithmetic is not the problem. The problem is sign. Modified duration enters with a negative — a yield increase lowers price. You have made this error three times this month, always on bonds with durations above six.
The first thing the tool does when I get a question wrong is not tell me the right answer. It tells me whyI got it wrong. Not “you picked B, the answer is A,” but: you applied modified duration without its negative sign; this is the third time that specific error has surfaced. A wrong answer without a diagnosis is noise. A wrong answer with a diagnosis is a lesson. The entire app is built around producing the second and refusing to produce the first.
The second thing is allocation. Fixed Income is eleven to fourteen percent of the Level I exam. Portfolio Management is five to eight. Most candidates study both roughly equally, because the textbook gives them roughly equal page counts. That is not how you should spend your time. The tool allocates hours by exam weight and by where you, specifically, are weakest — which means this week Derivatives gets ninety minutes and Ethics gets none, and next week that will be different.
The third is the definition of done. In a textbook, you are done when you have read the chapter. In this tool, you are done when you can explain the chapter back in your own words and an evaluator thinks your explanation is coherent. This is the Feynman mode, and it is the single feature that changed my study habits the most. I would read convexity, feel I understood convexity, try to explain convexity, and discover I did not understand convexity. That discovery, repeated across ninety concepts, is the entire product.
If you cannot explain it, you do not know it. The tool’s job is to find out which one is true — and then, if it is the second one, to do something about it.
Seven days free, no credit card. If you stay, the Standard tier is $29 a month — and as a founding user (anyone who signs up in the first 30 days from launch), you keep 50% off forever: $14.50 a month for as long as you stay subscribed, or $124.50a year if you’d rather pay annually. That price is locked. It does not creep up later. There is a 7-day refund with no form to fill out — reply to the receipt email and I will send it back the same day. If you are a student and that number is still too much, email me at dylan@greymontprep.com and I will sort something out. The point of the tool is to help you pass. The point is not to extract money from people who cannot afford it.
I am not going to promise you this will guarantee you pass. No tool can. What it will do is tell you, honestly and continuously, what you know and what you do not — and then do the smallest amount of work necessary, today, to close the gap a little. Repeat that for ten weeks and the gap closes.
If that is useful to you, the link above is how you start. If it is not, that is fine — at least now you know what you were looking for.