Dr. Geoffrey Apel, Ph.D., an expert in Exam IFM preparation, will provide a personalized, hands-on approach to helping each and every student significantly improve their mastery of Exam IFM syllabus understanding and problem solving during this seminar series. Any individual who has been a previous student of Dr. Apel has experienced his passion, dedication, and incredible ability to place students in a very strong position to pass their actuarial exams. Learn more
The Exam IFM Seminar Series provides the following:
- Five seminars under the leadership of Dr. Geoffrey Apel, recognized as one of the most experienced and best Exam IFM instructors in the profession. The seminar series focuses on providing syllabus topic review and the teaching of invaluable strategies, techniques, and methods to help students reach a more advanced level of IFM problem solving mastery
- Bridge the gap between your strong understanding of exam syllabus topics and the ability to effectively solve problems
- Learn many useful strategies, methods, and shortcuts for approaching, attacking and solving IFM problems the best ways
- Understand essential principles behind common formulas
- Learn important time-saving strategies for lengthy computations
- Discuss the most important pricing techniques, and apply them to many different situations
- Students receive the full recording of seminars following their completion
Schedule
Live Seminars
Seminar 1: 11/5
4:30 PM - 7:00 PM EDT
4:30 PM - 7:00 PM EDT
Seminar 1: Essentials of Options, Forwards, and Futures
- Defining options is easy, but how should you think about them?
- A good system for handling complicated portfolios
- Two important additional graphs to know
- Combining Graphs - solving difficult problems quickly
- Synthetic Forwards - understanding Cash & Carry arbitrage
- Futures - how to manage it all
- Insurance strategies and hedging using options
Seminar 2: 11/6
11:00 AM - 1:30 PM EST
11:00 AM - 1:30 PM EST
Seminar 2: Prepaid Forwards and Option Bounds
- Prepaid Forwards - why so important?
- Put-Call Parity - The golden formula
- Put-Call Duality
- Currency Options
- Option Bounds - an easy way to remember them
- Option Bounds - exploiting arbitrage
- American Options - when to early exercise
Seminar 3: 11/12
4:30 PM - 7:00 PM EST
4:30 PM - 7:00 PM EST
Seminar 3: Advanced Options
- Exotic Options & their payoffs
- Risk-Neutral Pricing - what exactly is that?
- Binomial Pricing on Exotic Options
- Replicating Portfolios - Handling Arbitrage
- Replicating Portfolios for Futures Contracts
Seminar 4: 11/13
11:00 AM - 1:30 PM EST
11:00 AM - 1:30 PM EST
Seminar 4: Lognormal Stock Prices
- Normal Distribution - the properties that will change your world!
- Lognormal Problems Made Easy
- Estimating Expected Return & Volatility (given historical prices)
- Probabilities & Expected Values - Risk-neutral & true probabilities
- Risk-Neutral Pricing (revisited)
- Black-Scholes Formula - which version to always use
- Pricing Exchange & Currency Options - overcoming the common issues
Seminar 5: 11/19
4:30 - 7:00 PM EST
4:30 - 7:00 PM EST
Seminar 5: Greeks, Delta-Hedging, & Exotic Options
- The Greeks - what are they? and what to actually know?
- Elasticity - how to work with it, and why is it so important
- Delta hedging the easy way
- Hedging Anything With Anything
- Prepaid Forwards (revisited) - the key to everything
- Exotic Options (revisited) - Forward Start, Chooser, Gap, Shout, & Rainbow
- Max, Min options
