8007 PRMIA Exam II: Mathematical Foundations of Risk Measurement - 2015 Edition Free Practice Exam Questions (2025 Updated)

An option has value 10 when the underlying price is 99 and value 9.5 when the underlying price is 101. Approximate the value of the option delta using a first order central finite difference.

The Lagrangian of a constrained optimisation problem is given by L(x,y,λ) = 16x+8x2+4y-λ(4x+y-20), where λ is the Lagrange multiplier. What is the solution for x and y?

You are to perform a simple linear regression using the dependent variable Y and the independent variable X (Y = a + bX). Suppose that cov(X,Y)=10, var(X)= 5, and that the mean of X is 1 and the mean of Y is 2. What are the values for the regression parameters a and b?

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

You invest $100 000 for 3 years at a continuously compounded rate of 3%. At the end of 3 years, you redeem the investment. Taxes of 22% are applied at the time of redemption. What is your approximate after-tax profit from the investment, rounded to $10?

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?

Consider the following distribution data for a random variable X: What is the mean and variance of X?

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

Which of the following statements are true about Maximum Likelihood Estimation?

(i) MLE can be applied even if the error terms are not i.i.d. normal.

(ii) MLE involves integrating a likelihood function or a log-likelihood function.

(iii) MLE yields parameter estimates that are consistent.

Let N(.) denote the cumulative distribution function and suppose that X and Y are standard normally distributed and uncorrelated. Using the fact that N(1.96)=0.975, the probability that X ≤ 0 and Y ≤ 1.96 is approximately

Suppose we perform a principle component analysis of the correlation matrix of the returns of 13 yields along the yield curve. The largest eigenvalue of the correlation matrix is 9.8. What percentage of return volatility is explained by the first component? (You may use the fact that the sum of the diagonal elements of a square matrix is always equal to the sum of its eigenvalues.)

Evaluate the derivative of exp(x2 + 2x + 1) at the point x = -1

What is the simplest form of this expression: log2(165/2)

Suppose 60% of capital is invested in asset 1, with volatility 40% and the rest is invested in asset 2, with volatility 30%. If the two asset returns have a correlation of -0.5, what is the volatility of the portfolio?

There are two portfolios with no overlapping of stocks or bonds. Portfolio 1 has 6 stocks and 6 bonds. Portfolio 2 has 4 stocks and 8 bonds. If we randomly select one stock, what is the probability that it came from Portfolio1?

An asset price S is lognormally distributed if:

You are investigating the relationship between weather and stock market performance. To do this, you pick 100 stock market locations all over the world. For each location, you collect yesterday's mean temperature and humidity and yesterday's local index return. Performing a regression analysis on this data is an example of…

The bisection method can be used for solving f(x)=0 for a unique solution of x, when

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