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  • [Series 65] 48, Fixed Income Portfolio Strategies

    [Series 65] 48, Fixed Income Portfolio Strategies
    May 11 2026
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams. In this episode you will learn: - To differentiate passive bond strategies: laddering for steady cash flow, barbells for a yield/liquidity mix, and bullets for a specific future liability. - That immunization is a method to offset interest rate risk by matching a portfolio's duration to an investor's time horizon. - To identify the motives behind different bond swaps, such as substitution swaps for relative value and rate anticipation swaps for interest rate forecasting. - That a primary benefit of a laddered bond portfolio is the mitigation of reinvestment risk by staggering maturity dates. - How to match the correct fixed-income strategy, like a bullet portfolio or duration matching, to a client's specific financial goal, which is a common exam question. For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
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    4 Min.
  • [Series 65] 47, Active vs Passive Investment Management

    [Series 65] 47, Active vs Passive Investment Management
    May 10 2026
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams. In this episode you will learn: - Why passive investing, through index funds, typically features significantly lower expense ratios than active management. - How the low portfolio turnover of index funds leads to greater tax efficiency by minimizing capital gains distributions. - The long-term performance data indicating that a majority of active managers fail to outperform their benchmarks after fees. - Common exam traps, such as focusing on short-term past performance of an active fund instead of the long-term impact of its higher costs. - A mnemonic to recall the core benefits of passive investing: Tracking the index, Tax-efficient, and Tiny fees. For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
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    4 Min.
  • [Series 65] 46, Asset Allocation Strategies

    [Series 65] 46, Asset Allocation Strategies
    May 9 2026
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams. In this episode you will learn: - Strategic allocation is a long-term, passive strategy based on a client's policy statement, while tactical allocation involves short-term, active deviations to exploit market opportunities. - A constant ratio plan rebalances a portfolio back to its target percentages when market movements cause the allocation to drift. - A constant dollar plan maintains a specific dollar amount in an asset class, rebalancing by selling when the value exceeds the target and buying when it falls below. - The '100 minus age' rule is a simplified guideline for determining stock allocation that often appears on the exam but ignores individual client factors like risk tolerance. - A key exam distinction is the rebalancing trigger: constant ratio plans are triggered by percentage deviations, while constant dollar plans are triggered by a fixed dollar value. For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
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    3 Min.
  • [Series 65] 45, Sharpe Treynor and Jensen Performance Measures

    [Series 65] 45, Sharpe Treynor and Jensen Performance Measures
    May 8 2026
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams. In this episode you will learn: - The Sharpe Ratio uses standard deviation to measure return per unit of total risk, making it ideal for non-diversified portfolios. - The Treynor Ratio uses beta to measure return per unit of systematic risk, making it the correct choice for well-diversified portfolios. - Jensen's Alpha is a measure of a manager's skill, calculating the excess return a portfolio earned above its expected return based on its beta. - How the Series 65 exam tests these concepts conceptually, focusing on which measure is appropriate for a given scenario rather than complex calculations. - A simple mnemonic to remember the key risk component for each performance measure: Sharpe for Standard Deviation, Treynor for Beta, and Jensen for Genius (Alpha). For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
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    4 Min.
  • [Series 65] 44, Alpha Beta and Standard Deviation

    [Series 65] 44, Alpha Beta and Standard Deviation
    May 7 2026
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams. In this episode you will learn: - Standard deviation measures an investment's total risk, which is the combination of systematic and unsystematic risk. - Beta is a narrower metric that measures only the systematic, or market, risk of an investment relative to a benchmark like the S&P 500. - Alpha represents the excess return an investment earns above its expected return, given its beta, serving as a measure of manager performance. - R-squared indicates how much of a portfolio's movement is explained by its benchmark, and a high R-squared is necessary for alpha and beta to be considered reliable statistics. - A common Series 65 exam trap involves a security with a high alpha but a low R-squared, which implies the alpha is not a meaningful indicator of performance. For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
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    4 Min.
  • [Series 65] 43, Efficient Market Hypothesis

    [Series 65] 43, Efficient Market Hypothesis
    May 6 2026
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams. In this episode you will learn: - Weak-form EMH states that past price and volume data are priced in, making technical analysis ineffective. - Semi-strong form EMH posits all public information is reflected in prices, rendering both technical and fundamental analysis useless for outperformance. - Strong-form EMH asserts that all information, including private insider data, is priced in, making it impossible for anyone to consistently beat the market. - A strong belief in the Efficient Market Hypothesis logically leads to a preference for passive investment strategies, like index funds, over active management. - The Random Walk Theory aligns with EMH, suggesting stock price changes are random and unpredictable, reinforcing the idea that past performance cannot predict future results. For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
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    4 Min.
  • [Series 65] 42, Capital Asset Pricing Model

    [Series 65] 42, Capital Asset Pricing Model
    May 5 2026
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams. In this episode you will learn: - How to calculate a security's expected return using the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) formula. - The roles of the risk-free rate, beta, and the market risk premium in the CAPM calculation. - Why the Security Market Line (SML) is the graphical representation of CAPM. - How to use the SML to determine if a security is undervalued, overvalued, or fairly valued. - To identify common distractor information, like standard deviation, in Series 65 CAPM questions. For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
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    3 Min.
  • [Series 65] 41, Modern Portfolio Theory

    [Series 65] 41, Modern Portfolio Theory
    May 4 2026
    This podcast is made by Ran Chen, who holds an EA license, Insurance and Securities licenses (Series 6, 63, 65), and the CFP® designation. He is passionate about opening access to high-quality exam preparation resources and helping learners prepare more effectively for professional certification exams. In this episode you will learn: - Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) assumes investors are risk-averse and seek to maximize returns for a given level of risk. - The efficient frontier represents a set of optimal portfolios offering the highest return for each level of risk. - Diversification can reduce unsystematic (company-specific) risk but not systematic (market) risk. - The key to effective diversification is combining assets with low or negative correlation. - For diversified portfolios, beta is the correct risk measure; for non-diversified portfolios, use standard deviation. For more free exam prep tools, practice questions, and AI-powered explanations, visit https://open-exam-prep.com/ or YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Open-exam-prep
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    4 Min.