CFA Mock Lab Free calculators

Twenty-four drills that make the BA II Plus automatic

The exam does not test whether you know the annuity formula. It tests whether you can key it in under a minute, on the fourth hour, without thinking about it. That is a motor skill, and motor skills come from drilling — not from reading the manual again.

What goes wrong

Almost nobody fails a time-value question because they don't know the maths. They fail it because the machine was still carrying the last question:

P/Y left at 12 — every rate you key is silently divided by twelve.
BGN left on — every annuity is out by a factor of one plus the rate, and the annunciator that says so is four pixels tall.
TVM never cleared — the previous question's PMT is still in the register, quietly adding a cash flow you never entered.

Each of those is one keystroke to prevent and impossible to spot after the fact. The first four drills are about nothing else.

The drills

1 · Set the machine upReset, decimals, P/Y and C/Y, clearing TVM. The four nobody does.

2 · TVM you can trustEvery variable solved from the other three, and the sign convention that stops the machine dead.

3 · Annuities and loansOrdinary and due, the BGN flag, and a mortgage keyed the way the question is worded.

4 · Cash flows, NPV and IRRThe worksheet where the arrow keys matter as much as the numbers.

5 · Bonds and rate conversionsPricing and yield through TVM, nominal to effective and back.

6 · Statistics and the restOne-variable, regression, percent change, day count — one mark each, all of them free.

What one drill looks like

D08 — The sign convention, and Error 5 Same-sign PV and FV has no solution. The machine tells you so, and candidates read it as a broken calculator.

2ND CLR TVM CE|C 10 N 1000 PV 2000 FV CPT I/Y → Error 5

CE|C 10 N 1000 +/− PV 2000 FV CPT I/Y → 7.1773

Trap. Error 5 is not a fault. It means you told it money went out twice. One of the two is negative.

Twenty-four of those: the exact keys, the display you should be looking at, and the specific way each one goes wrong.

Why the answers are right

Every expected display on every drill is checked by a script that keys the drill into a working BA II Plus by clicking the actual keys, then reads the answer off the rendered LCD. Twenty-nine assertions, and they all pass before anything ships. A keystroke guide that was typed out by hand cannot tell you that, which is why so many of them have a wrong arrow press in the middle of a worksheet.

Practise where you read

The BA II Plus and BA II Professional on this site stay free, with no sign-up — that has not changed and won't. Open one in a second tab and drill straight into it, or work on your own hardware. The drills are the paid part; the calculator never is.

Get it

IDR 199,000

One payment, yours permanently. Includes every later revision. Roughly the price of two coffees against a registration fee you have already paid.

Signing in with Google opens a free account and a message thread. Say you want the drills and how you'd like to pay — bank transfer and QRIS both work, and you get a receipt you can hand to an employer.