News from the trenches

Just a quick update from yours truly. In true blogger fashion, I'll start by making excuses for why I've been so slow posting lately:

1) Exams. I did three actuarial exams this sitting, which is generally acknowledged to be borderline suicidal. I would estimate I passed two out of three, but don't ask me which two.

2) New placement. I'm working on a redress project: figuring out how much people are owed due to a company's breach of FSA rules. The subject of this one is Pensions Switching, an issue that has a good chance of becoming the Next Big Scandal. So far the Daily Mail hasn't found out about it, though.

3) Crappy connection. Grrrr.

In other news, I've started studying for actuarial subject CT8. This is a good one for me - it covers all that stochastic modelling stuff I've been babbling about. I'm already halfway through the course. If all goes to plan, I'll be able to effectively finish it before the results from the last set of exams come out on 2nd July. The fact that I'm in danger of being overtaken on exams by several of my younger friends has absolutely nothing to do with this sudden spurt of action...

I'll write more about the new placement at some point. Not so much because of the actuarial content (nothing really interesting there) but because we're having to develop a complete set of spreadsheets from scratch. I seem to have wound up handling the quality control, which sounds boring but is actually the ideal role for a skeptic. Watch this space.