8002 Practice Exam Questions with Answers PRM Certification - Exam II: Mathematical Foundations of Risk Measurement Certification

Which of the following statements concerning class intervals used for grouping of data is correct?

When grouping data, attention must be paid to the following with regards to class intervals:

1. Class intervals should not overlap

2. Class intervals should be of equal size unless there is a specific need to highlight data within a specific subgroup

3. The class intervals should be large enough so that they not obscure interesting variation within the group

At what point x does the function f(x) = x3 - 4x2 + 1 have a local minimum?

The correlation between two asset returns is 1. What is the smallest eigenvalue of their correlation matrix?

A biased coin has a probability of getting heads equal to 0.3. If the coin is tossed 4 times, what is the probability of getting heads at least two times?

You are given the following regressions of the first difference of the log of a commodity price on the lagged price and of the first difference of the log return on the lagged log return. Each regression is based on 100 data points and figures in square brackets denote the estimated standard errors of the coefficient estimates:

Which of the following hypotheses can be accepted based on these regressions at the 5% confidence level (corresponding to a critical value of the Dickey Fuller test statistic of – 2.89)?

Assume that 40% of all financial organizations investigated by authorities turn out to be fraudulent.

What is the probability of randomly investigating 2 different organizations and finding that neither is fraudulent; and what is the probability of finding exactly one being fraudulent?

Which of the following is not a sequence?

Bond convexity is closely related to …

A 95% confidence interval for a parameter estimate can be interpreted as follows:

Exploring a regression model for values of the independent variable that have not been observed is most accurately described as…

The sum of the infinite series 1+1/2+1/3+1/4+1/5+.... equals:

Every covariance matrix must be positive semi-definite. If it were not then:

Let E(X ) = 1, E(Y ) = 3, Corr(X, Y ) = -0.2, E(X2 ) = 10 and E(Y2 ) = 13. Find the covariance between X and Y

If the annual volatility of returns is 25% what is the variance of the quarterly returns?

In a portfolio there are 7 bonds: 2 AAA Corporate bonds, 2 AAA Agency bonds, 1 AA Corporate and 2 AA Agency bonds. By an unexplained characteristic the probability of any specific AAA bond outperforming the others is twice the probability of any specific AA bond outperforming the others. What is the probability that an AA bond or a Corporate bond outperforms all of the others?

Let f(x) = c for x in [0,4] and 0 for other values of x.

What is the value of the constant c that makes f(x) a probability density function; and what if f(x) = cx for x in [0,4]?

A 2-step binomial tree is used to value an American put option with strike 105, given that the underlying price is currently 100. At each step the underlying price can move up by 10 or down by 10 and the risk-neutral probability of an up move is 0.6. There are no dividends paid on the underlying and the continuously compounded risk free interest rate over each time step is 1%. What is the value of the option in this model?

Over four consecutive years fund X returns 1%, 5%, -3%, 8%. What is the average growth rate of fund X over this period?

A linear regression gives the following output:

Figures in square brackets are estimated standard errors of the coefficient estimates.

Which of the following is an approximate 95% confidence interval for the true value of the coefficient of ?

For a quadratic equation, which of the following is FALSE?

Calculate the determinant of the following matrix:

Stress testing portfolios requires changing the asset volatilities and correlations to extreme values. Which of the following would lead to a non positive definite covariance matrix?

Which of the following statements is true?

Consider an investment fund with the following annual return rates over 8 years: +6%, -6%, +12%, -12%, +3%, -3%, +9%, -9% .

What can you say about the annual geometric and arithmetic mean returns of this investment fund?

In a quadratic Taylor approximation, a function is approximated by:

Consider the linear regression model for the returns of stock A and the returns of stock B. Stock A is 50% more volatile than stock B. Which of the following statements is TRUE?

A bond has modified duration 6 and convexity 30. Find the duration-convexity approximation to the percentage change in bond price when its yield increases by 5 basis points

Kurtosis(X) is defined as the fourth centred moment of X, divided by the square of the variance of X. Assuming X is a normally distributed variable, what is Kurtosis(X)?

The fundamental theorem of analysis establishes a relation between

Which of the following can induce a 'multicollinearity' problem in a regression model?

Simple linear regression involves one dependent variable, one independent variable and one error variable. In contrast, multiple linear regression uses…

The Newton-Raphson method

Concerning a standard normal distribution and a Student's t distribution (with more than four degrees of freedom), which of the following is true?

What is the indefinite integral of the function f(x) = ln(x), where ln(x) denotes the natural logarithmic function?