Actuarial Exam Tactics

Tom Miller recognized the need to write this book a few years ago, after reviewing postings on popular discussion pages frequented by actuaries. He was surprised and troubled by the magnitude of misinformation posted on these websites. Clearly actuaries and actuarial students posting this information are only trying to be helpful to one another, but they frequently lack the necessary experience and expertise to offer sound advice. Tom seeks to provide readers of his career guide with valuable insights regarding the actuarial employment market, covering topics such as choice of product specialization, how to conduct effective job searches, switching successfully from insurance to consulting and inside tips on what clients are really looking for when they interview you. Armed with deep knowledge and a unique perspective on the actuarial profession, Tom expects that this book will be a resource that will help you make better career decisions and "Achieve Your Pinnacle."

What would you like to do with your life? What career would allow you to fulfill your dreams of success? If you like mathematics-and the prospect of a highly mobile, international profession-consider becoming an actuary. Szabo's Actuaries' Survival Guide, Second Edition explains what actuaries are, what they do, and where they do it. It describes exciting combinations of ideas, techniques, and skills involved in the day-to-day work of actuaries. This second edition has been updated to reflect the rise of social networking and the internet, the progress toward a global knowledge-based economy, and the global expansion of the actuarial field that has occurred since the first edition. Includes details on the new structures of the Society of Actuaries' (SOA) and Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS) examinations, as well as sample questions and answers Presents an overview of career options, includes profiles of companies & agencies that employ actuaries. Provides a link between theory and practice and helps readers understand the blend of qualitative and quantitative skills and knowledge required to succeed in actuarial exams Includes insights provided by over 50 actuaries and actuarial students about the actuarial profession Author Fred Szabo has directed the Actuarial Co-op Program at Concordia for over fifteen years

A Business Week, New York Times Business, and USA Today Bestseller "Ambitious and readable . . . an engaging introduction to the oddsmakers, whom Bernstein regards as true humanists helping to release mankind from the choke holds of superstition and fatalism." —The New York Times "An extraordinarily entertaining and informative book." —The Wall Street Journal "A lively panoramic book . . . Against the Gods sets up an ambitious premise and then delivers on it." —Business Week "Deserves to be, and surely will be, widely read." —The Economist "[A] challenging book, one that may change forever the way people think about the world." —Worth "No one else could have written a book of such central importance with so much charm and excitement." —Robert Heilbroner author, The Worldly Philosophers "With his wonderful knowledge of the history and current manifestations of risk, Peter Bernstein brings us Against the Gods. Nothing like it will come out of the financial world this year or ever. I speak carefully: no one should miss it." —John Kenneth Galbraith Professor of Economics Emeritus, Harvard University In this unique exploration of the role of risk in our society, Peter Bernstein argues that the notion of bringing risk under control is one of the central ideas that distinguishes modern times from the distant past. Against the Gods chronicles the remarkable intellectual adventure that liberated humanity from oracles and soothsayers by means of the powerful tools of risk management that are available to us today. "An extremely readable history of risk." —Barron's "Fascinating . . . this challenging volume will help you understand the uncertainties that every investor must face." —Money "A singular achievement." —Times Literary Supplement "There's a growing market for savants who can render the recondite intelligibly-witness Stephen Jay Gould (natural history), Oliver Sacks (disease), Richard Dawkins (heredity), James Gleick (physics), Paul Krugman (economics)-and Bernstein would mingle well in their company." —The Australian

Learn functional data structures and algorithms for your applications and bring their benefits to your work now About This Book Moving from object-oriented programming to functional programming? This book will help you get started with functional programming. Easy-to-understand explanations of practical topics will help you get started with functional data structures. Illustrative diagrams to explain the algorithms in detail. Get hands-on practice of Scala to get the most out of functional programming. Who This Book Is For This book is for those who have some experience in functional programming languages. The data structures in this book are primarily written in Scala, however implementing the algorithms in other functional languages should be straight forward. What You Will Learn Learn to think in the functional paradigm Understand common data structures and the associated algorithms, as well as the context in which they are commonly used Take a look at the runtime and space complexities with the O notation See how ADTs are implemented in a functional setting Explore the basic theme of immutability and persistent data structures Find out how the internal algorithms are redesigned to exploit structural sharing, so that the persistent data structures perform well, avoiding needless copying. Get to know functional features like lazy evaluation and recursion used to implement efficient algorithms Gain Scala best practices and idioms In Detail Functional data structures have the power to improve the codebase of an application and improve efficiency. With the advent of functional programming and with powerful functional languages such as Scala, Clojure and Elixir becoming part of important enterprise applications, functional data structures have gained an important place in the developer toolkit. Immutability is a cornerstone of functional programming. Immutable and persistent data structures are thread safe by definition and hence very appealing for writing robust concurrent programs. How do we express traditional algorithms in functional setting? Won't we end up copying too much? Do we trade performance for versioned data structures? This book attempts to answer these questions by looking at functional implementations of traditional algorithms. It begins with a refresher and consolidation of what functional programming is all about. Next, you'll get to know about Lists, the work horse data type for most functional languages. We show what structural sharing means and how it helps to make immutable data structures efficient and practical. Scala is the primary implementation languages for most of the examples. At times, we also present Clojure snippets to illustrate the underlying fundamental theme. While writing code, we use ADTs (abstract data types). Stacks, Queues, Trees and Graphs are all familiar ADTs. You will see how these ADTs are implemented in a functional setting. We look at implementation techniques like amortization and lazy evaluation to ensure efficiency. By the end of the book, you will be able to write efficient functional data structures and algorithms for your applications. Style and approach Step-by-step topics will help you get started with functional programming. Learn by doing with hands-on code snippets that give you practical experience of the subject.

Introducing the fundamentals of retail credit risk management, this book provides a broad and applied investigation of the related modeling theory and methods, and explores the interconnections of risk management, by focusing on retail and the constant reference to the implications of the financial crisis for credit risk management.