Rounding issues.

bloodline

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Can anyone advise on the number of decimal places CFAI will typical expect candidates to work with?
I know this may sound a little weird, but i was calculating the first question on EOC for swaps. By my calculations, i arrived at -88,000 as an answer and the right answer in the text was -92,500.
The difference was because CFAI rounded all calculations to four decimal places, i used 5 decimal places.
Is there a specific requirement for this that I am currently unaware of?
 
No and this is also driving me bats. Within the same question, they rounded to three decimals for one calc, and to seven for another calc. I used four for both and got a wildly different answer. (Why the heck would they round to two different standards within the SAME QUESTION??????)
I messaged them yesterday about this very issue. No answer.
 
Haha, the rounding differences in swaps drove me fucking bonkers! I spent more time adjusting decimal places in my calculator settings than performing calculations (or so it felt) and still found myself with slightly different answers.
 
I find the above somewhat troubling, especially thesloth’s example. Back in the day, we were taught never to round an intermediate calculation, only the final answer.
 
So there’s nothing that can be done on this except hope that somehow, you will be in sync with CFAI exam setters with regards choice of rounding?
 
I find it incredible that a 5% difference can be explained by 4 decimal places vs. 5.
 
The rounding errors caused a 0.00018 difference, but when this is muliplied by a notional amount of 25 million, the difference become quickly pronounced.
 
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