Quantitative Methods Practice for Finance Exams (CFA-Style Level I)

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Value an uneven cash-flow stream with NPV and IRR, then measure one investor's return twice: money-weighted (IRR of the investor's flows) and time-weighted (chained holding-period returns).
• Value a 10-year payment stream paid at year-end and at the start of each year, a preferred share, a perpetuity that starts later and a growing dividend.
• Describe ten years of fund returns: arithmetic and geometric mean, median, skewness and excess kurtosis.
• Weight scenario returns by their probabilities to get expected return, standard deviation, covariance and correlation, then the risk of a 60/40 portfolio.
• Compute binomial probabilities for a trading signal, a z-score for a bad year and Roy's safety-first ratio with the shortfall probability of three portfolios.
• Build 95 % and 99 % confidence intervals for a fund's mean monthly return from a small sample, with the standard error and critical t values.
• Test whether a fund's mean active return is above zero: t-statistic, critical value, one-tailed p-value and the decision rule.
• Regress a fund's excess returns on the market's, read the slope as beta, measure fit with R² and SEE, test the slope and chart the regression line.