...and Portfolio Management
I haven't finished going over the Financial Statement Analysis book, because the material is fairly dense. However, I decided to skip ahead and see what the fairly thin Corporate Finance and Portfolio Management book was about.
Turns out, fairly pedestrian stuff. There's a reading on leverage (operating, and financial), a chapter on WACC, a chapter on NPV and other methods of valuing projects. The biggest issue here is going to be definitions, and making sure those are well-understood. There's also a section on corporate governance, which is completely qualitative, and appears to be mostly common sense mixed with a little experience.
Most of the three quantitative chapters are "Optional," and while this is stuff we had covered in class, the CFA seems to think that, for Level I, at least, the material isn't necessary to pass the exam.
The Portfolio section is expectedly disappointing. There's a basic section on asset allocation, and then two most chapters based on Markowitz and CAPM. Both of these theories rely on the clearly untrue notion that price movements are normal, and that price levels and log-normal. The whole exercise has the air of medieval medicine, or maybe modern social sciences, where you have to score points by repeating back orthodoxies.
Still, the good news is that I should be able to work through the corporate problems today, the portfolio problems tomorrow, and I will have knocked off a whole book (#4) in two days.