Registering for Level 1 - Dec (2015) - in August

CFA General
#1

Hi Guys,

I am a member of ACCA (21 years old). Its been almost 2 years since I have passed ACCA’s exams. For those who don’t know, ACCA is a Chartered Certificate in Accounting from a body in UK (of the same name). I currently reside in Dubai and work full-time. I have been thinking to register with CFA for the last one year but everytime I start reading the Ethics section in Part 1, it bores me to death. So this time I decided to get over Part 1 as quickly as possible.

My question is from the fellows who have already attempted CFA Level 1 and have attempted ACCA or any other professional accounting exam as well.

I haven’t yet read any book in curriculum but I am planning to start-off and follow a rigourous schedule until the exam. Frankly, throughout ACCA I have only studied 10-15 days thouroughly for all the exams (3 exams each six months), and I have easily passed them.

So is it possible to approach the CFA exams the same way, I know that the curriculum books are pretty fat but I wanna know about the difficulty level of the exam.

In a nutshell, is it possible I start now and attempt the exam reasonably in December? How much effort did it take you for Level 1… I know it varies, but still a ballpark figure can be given.

I would really appreciate your taking time to provide a useful opinion.

PS: I have done all the ACCA exams on self-study and I will adopt the same approach for CFA.

#2

It took me awhile to get going in L1 as I had never really done self-study of this magnitude before and I have the attention span of a fly. Plus the damn Red Sox decided to win the World Series a month and a half before the exam. So that was the biggest hurdle for me, learning how to study again, making good use of time, not getting distracted, etc.

I was 6-7 years removed from my undergrad finance classes and I never paid attention in them anyway so I found the material definitely challenging at times, but if you start now and use your time wisely you shouldn’t have a problem. I probably put in ~300 hours to pass L1.

#3

Im taking it in June and havent even started studying