The Actuarial Study Lab
Everything S.MONK gives away, in one place. 87 worked explainers, five calculators and 596 defined terms. No account, no payment, no email address.
- 87worked explainers, one idea each
- 6papers covered
- 5calculators that work in the browser
- 596terms defined, with examples
Worked explainers
One idea per page, explained from scratch, each ending in a worked example with the arithmetic shown in full. Start anywhere.
- Simple and compound interest, and the principle that rules out one of them
- Present value, the discount factor, and why d is not i
- Nominal rates payable p times a year, and the loan that costs more than it says
- Force of interest explained, and how it relates to i, v and d
- When the interest rate changes: steps, and a force that varies
- Utility theory and risk aversion: non-satiation, A(w) and R(w)
- Measures of investment risk: variance, semi-variance, VaR and Tail VaR
- CAPM and the security market line: beta and the market price of risk
- Ito's lemma explained term by term, and what it does to a share price
- The chain ladder method: estimating outstanding claims from a run-off triangle
- Moment generating functions, and how to get moments out of them
- The central limit theorem, and when the normal approximation is safe
- Maximum likelihood estimation, step by step
- Confidence intervals: what the 95% actually means
- Hypothesis testing and p-values, without the folklore
- The survival function and the hazard rate, explained
- The Kaplan-Meier estimator, and why censoring needs it
- The Cox proportional hazards model, and what a hazard ratio means
- Markov chains: transition matrices, Chapman-Kolmogorov and the stationary distribution
- Central exposed to risk, and the two mortality rates it produces
- Why financial reporting is regulated, and who it is regulated for
- Share capital and loan capital: why each source costs what it does
- Leasing against buying, and the only comparison that settles it
- Profit is not cash, and why a growing company can run out of money
- Return on capital employed, and the two things that drive it
- Price elasticity of demand, and what it decides about a price rise
- Income and substitution effects: splitting one price change in two
- Profit maximisation and the shutdown decision, from one cost table
- Cournot and Bertrand: why the same two firms give two different answers
- Adverse selection and moral hazard, and what an insurer does about them
See a distribution change
Pick a distribution, move a parameter, and watch the curve move with it. Eleven of them across CS1 and CS2, with the mean and variance following along and the numbers printed underneath.
The distribution explorer Gamma, normal, Poisson, Weibull, Pareto and seven more. Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for.Exam countdown
How long until each sitting, and what the time you have left is good for. The other countdown on this site asks you to log in first, so no visitor has ever seen it. This one asks for nothing.
How long have you got? All six papers, the dates from the institutes own calendars, and the entry deadline. No account, no email address.Formula sheets
One printable sheet per paper, gathered from the explainers that teach them, so a sheet can never drift away from what the pages say. Every heading links back to the page that works the formula through.
Printable formula sheets CM1, CM2, CS1, CS2, CB1 and CB2 — 273 formulae in all. Print one and put it above the desk.Calculators
Five of them, working in the browser, nothing to install. They have been on the site for a while under a page about which Casio to take into the exam hall, where nobody looking for a tool would ever find them.
- Time value of money What a sum today is worth later, and the other way round.
- Interest rate conversion Nominal to effective, any frequency, and the force of interest.
- Annuity factors Immediate, due, deferred, for any term and rate.
- Bond price and duration Price from yield, and how far the price moves when the yield does.
- Mortality Survival and death probabilities straight off a life table.
The rest of it
All of it is written by S.MONK and free to read. Nothing on this page asks for an email address. If you want teaching as well as material, the courses are here.