FREE CFA Level1 classes in Bangalore on 5th July

Knowledge Varsity has launched CFA Level 1 coaching for december in Bangalore.

Soon to be launched in Mumbai.

The coaching is a blend of live face to face classes and videos.
The videos are much much better than Schweser and have been recorded by eminent faculty in finance.
The face to face sessions will be delivered by a FRM and CFA level 3 passed IITian.
For more details, please visit http://knowledgevarsity.com/courses.php?course=cfa
or mail to admissions@knowledgevarsity.com and a representative will get in touch with you.
Brochure Link : http://knowledgevarsity.com/brochure/CFA%20Training%20Program%20for%202009.pdf

CFA Training for 2009 Exam

This training program is conceived to provide the best guidance to the candidates who are preparing for the CFA examination conducted by CFA Institute
Please download brochure

For more details visit Course Page

Why Knowledge Varsity
Knowledge Varsity is in the space of education consulting and content development business. The firm has a network of highly qualified and experienced faculty both from India as well as from abroad. Knowledge Varsity faculty have worked with several Universities in USA for collaboration programs in Business Management. Knowledge Varsity is best equipped to bring the best resource to your benefit.

About the Faculty
Ratan Gupta, FRM: Mr. Gupta has passed all three levels of CFA. Mr. Gupta is a BTech in Computer Science from IIT Kharagpur and has extensive Financial Services consulting experience. He has been engaged in teaching CFA aspirants for the past one year.
LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ratan-gupta-frm/0/308/221

Our USP
• Structured course and complete coverage of the entire curriculum
• Excellent study material which focuses on problem solving and concepts
• Reduce your study time by up to 20% (as compared to self study)
• Small and interactive class
• Support through face to face discussion, phone, email and chat till the day of examination
• Blend of online and offline content and course for optimal utilization

Teaching Mode
• Face to face classes will be held on weekend
• Per weekend one class of 4 hours duration
• Homework assignment in each class
• One doubt class once a month

Tests
• Online part tests to cover each area and to make sure that the preparation is on track
• State of the art test engine that will help you analyze and improve the weak area
• Two full length offline tests

Fees
• INR 15,000/- inclusive of service tax
• Avail 10% discount if you are joining in a group of 2 or if you pay the full fee by 15th June
• Avail 20% discount if you are joining in a group of 3 or more

Classes will start from 28th June 2009
Demo Class on 14th June, 2009 at
Knowledge Varsity, #572, 21st Main, 36th Cross, Jayanagar 4 ‘T’ Block, Bangalore - 560 011
Hotline – +91-80-2664-3993 and +91-94487-06666

Speak to Ratan at 9886316649 for more details

Dealing with difficult times

Yesterday I met with a young person, about 26-28 years old, who happened to have lost job during these difficult economic situations. What came across to my mind all along the conversation was his obsession to get back to some job. I perfectly understand – losing a job is very unhappy experience. Besides the financial implication of not earning (which was not the case with this person), job loss alters one’s daily routine. You will not know what to do during the day. You will not like to socialize much. You will not like to sit at home either. But mere empathizing with this problem would solve the problem. The problem of job loss is real. And there has to be a real world solution for that.

While in the obsession of getting back to some job, this individual had almost forgotten the rich and varied experience he had till now. He had a solid four years of experience with exposure to multiple domains. He had an MBA from a school of repute. He had accomplishments about which he felt good till now. One event (of losing the job) has made him forget all those and he now begins to doubt the quality of his experience and of his own abilities to accomplish.

Showing desperateness to get back to any job will not help. This is the time to sit and think long term. This is the time to record what one has accomplished and to try and tweak the future. Perhaps meeting some career specialists would help. The need of the hour is to add some thing to your previous accomplishments such that it becomes more holistic and thus a strong value proposition. For instance, enrolling into to a professional development certification or training activity, doing an ad-hoc project of interest, writing on some topic of your interest and publishing it or even teaching part time.

The day to day busy schedule of work place would not have allowed luxuries of learning and of dwelling into academic style of enquiry. But now is the time to make up for it. Document it in your resume. Show it off to the prospective employer and be frank enough to say – you just tried to convert this crisis into an opportunity – by making up for what you thought you always wanted to do –but you could not do while working.

FRM Training for 2009 Exam

FRM Training Program for 2009

This training program is conceived to provide the best guidance to the candidates who are preparing for the FRM examination conducted by GARP.

Why Knowledge Varsity
Knowledge Varsity is in the space of education consulting and content development business. The firm has a network of highly qualified and experienced faculty both from India as well as from abroad. Knowledge Varsity faculty have worked with several Universities in USA for collaboration programs in Business Management. Knowledge Varsity is best equipped to bring the best resource to your benefit.

About the Faculty
Ratan Gupta, FRM: Mr. Gupta has also passed all three levels of CFA. Mr. Gupta is a BTech in Computer Science from IIT Kharagpur and has extensive Financial Services consulting experience. He has been engaged in teaching CFA aspirants for the past one year.
LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ratan-gupta-frm/0/308/221

Our USP
· Structured course and complete coverage of the entire curriculum
· Excellent study material which focuses on problem solving
· Reduce your study time by up to 20% (as compared to self study)
· Small and interactive class
· Support through face to face discussion, phone, email and chat till the day of examination
· Blend of online and offline content and course for optimal utilization

Teaching Mode
· Face to face classes will be held on weekend
· Per weekend one class of 4 hours duration
· Homework assignment in each class
· One doubt class once a month
Tests
· Online part tests to cover each area and to make sure that the preparation is on track
· State of the art test engine that will help you analyze and improve performance in weak area
· Two full length offline tests

Fees
· INR 15,000/- inclusive of service tax
· Avail 10% discount if you are joining in a group of 2 or more

Classes will start from 6th June 2009 at
Knowledge Varsity, #572, 21st Main, 36th Cross, Jayanagar 4 ‘T’ Block, Bangalore - 560 011 Hotline – +91-80-2664-3993 and +91-94487-06666

Ingredients of a Brand Manager

Through my several years of experience with MBA students, most of them who are attracted to marketing tell me that they want to pursue a career in branding and that they are seeking brand manager’s position. And they talk about their creative bent of mind in support of their candidature to brand manager’s position.

There is nothing wrong in seeking to be a brand manager and being creative. Yet the logic seem does not work. While being creative is useful in any job and every job, to think that some how brand managers are the one’s who create labels, advertisements, run campaigns does not fit well.

Let us say – National Institute of Design (NID) – produces every year the students who are the best in Designing products, product communications, portals designs, apparel designs etc. If a NID grad is creative enough and would create what a company wants, why would the company hire an MBA to do the same job?

Alternatively, let us think that a company wants to run a promotion event in a retail mall. Puma (the Shoe brand) did it in various retail malls during IPL cricket event. PUMA mobile stores were parked right at the main entrance of the malls with visibly attractive images painted on it. And PUMA will hire event managers to run these special campaigns ad not necessarily brand mangers!

The crux of the question is what does a brand manager do? At the highest level – a brand manager is a strategic partner and member of the team that makes most important decisions at the top. He or She will work with Sales Manager, Product Manager, and Channel manager on such issues as brand repositioning, brand extension and branding of new products and services. He or She holds the key to communication to the consumers and any thing goes wrong – he or she would be necessarily be letting down the efforts gone into creation or improvement of the product (by the product manager) and in achieving the targets (by the sales manager)

If we arrive at this conclusion (that the brand manager is in charge of communication), then the next question could be “how does on get the communication right?” Is it by creativity? Is it by designing events? Is it by launching the ad campaign? Is it by crating road show? Is it by celebrity endorsement? Is it by Public Relations management?

OR is it by gaining insights into the consumers’ mind on an ongoing basis to find out how various brands (yours as well as your competitors) play out on an ongoing basis? Is it by finding new associations in the consumers’ mind by understanding that very hidden language which we want to decipher and use in effective brand communication? Is it by trying to be a partner with the product/Sales managers to identify newer needs that reinforce your corporate brand of being “Innovative?”

Once you understand the core of Brand managers’ job is to be the student of consumer life long and to be master on consumer behavior – rest all falls in place. As a brand manager, you decide whether to hire an ad agency to create communications or to have an internal team to work on the concepts; whether to hire an external event management firm to do the campaign or to set up an internal team to run the events; whether to hire an external PR agency or set up an in-house PR team?

Once a budding brand manager sets this (of being a student of consumer’s mind)as his/her core career objective, the starting point could be any thing. You can study the consumer behavior in action when you start our career as a sales person or a sales manager. You can gain insights into consumer behavior by being a market research executive; you can understand consumers while being a retails ore manager and so on. Regardless of the starting point of your career, you must always be curious to understand why consumers buy what they buy and most importantly who or which category of consumers buy.

CFA Level 1 - Quant Focus Area
1. Time value of money – You should be able to solve annuity problems, make sure to draw timelines
2. Holding period return, Effective annual yield, bank discount yield, bond equivalent yield, money market yield – make sure you remember the formula
3. Money weighted, time weighted return
4. Mean absolute deviation, standard deviation
5. Chebysev’s inequality – VERY IMPORTANT & easy
6. Coeffecient of variation, Sharpe ratio, Roy’s safety first rule – make sure you are able to analyse a set of portfolios on these measures
7. Make sure you know the location of mean, median, mode in skewed distribution
8. Know what kurtosis mean and implication in peaked distribution
9. Understand the probability concepts – important ones are joint probability and bayes therorem.. should be able to solve the problems which would come
10. You should solve problems to find out the standard deviation of portfolio where probability of the various return scenario is mentioned
11. You should be able to find the probability for a continuous probability distribution, using the concept of area under the curve
12. Properties of continuous and discrete probability function
13. sampling error and interpretation of sampling error
14. standard error of sample mean
15. properties of estimator (read this -> theoretical but can expect one question)
16. Should be able to construct confidence intervals
17. Remember which distribution to use (Z/T) depending on sample size and distribution (normal/non-normal) with known/unknown variance
18. Understand the process of hypothesis testing -> remember the 7 steps -> can get 1 question here
19. Remember to get alternative and null hypothesis from word problem statement -> one question to be asked here
20. Significance level
21. Type I and type II error -> very important -> especially how to reduce them
22. You would be asked to find the test statistics for Chi test/F test and population mean of normally distributed pop with known and unknown variance-> no formula will be given here -> so remember the formula
23. Formula will be given for the testing equality of the population means of two normally distributed populations equal or unequal variances, and mean difference of two normally distributed populations (paired comparisons test
24. Technical analysis – don’t expect much -> no need of calculation here -> understand the bullish and bearish sentiments, contrarian view.

Knowledge Varisty