My name is Mike, and it is my pleasure to be part of such a over-achieving forum! I am too a candidate for the CFA Level I exam held on December 6th, 2014.
However, it is my first time I take it, and I don’t really know what the best study material would be.
I was thinking of getting:
The CFA study material provided by the CFA Institute (the one that comes with the registration fee).
The Essential Study Package from Schweser which includes Schweser Notes, SchweserPro QBank, and 6 full-length practice exams
Do you guys think that I would be good with those above listed? Are they worth the money they ask?
My ideas was to get the material before the summer starts, and study everything during the summer and my last semester of undergraduate school ( Fall 2014 ). What do you guys think?
Thank you! I have just registered for the CFA in December. Moreover, I got the e-book version of the CFA study material. Towards the end of May, I will purchase Schweser’s notes and q-bank.
Can anyone else chime in on this? I’ve so far been preparing to use just the CFAI materials, but if access to a 3rd party product is considered essential, I’d like to hear the “pro’s” of that position.
Personally, I used Schweser’s stuff and passed all three levels. Never cracked CFAI stuff except for EOC questions. And if you have the budget for it, that’s what I’d recommend.
First, thank you very much for your advice! I am no expert and I have never taken the CFA before… could you please suggest me a study plan/method for my December exam?
I won’t have school in the summer, so I want to dedicate a lot of time to studying for the CFAI. From September, I will have my last semester of undergraduate.
Thank you so much again for your help and your time!
Everything you need to pass is in the CFAI books obviously. CFAI also gives explanations so you understand concepts instead of just memorizing formulas. Anyways, everyone has their own opinion on this so you have to decide for yourself but if you understand the CFAI books and have the time to read CFAI, no need to complicate matters with a third party service. Just my opinion.
Yes, you’ll probably get a better understanding of the subject material if you use CFA stuff. But I wasn’t terribly interested in learning everything about everything. I just wanted to pass the test, knowing full well that I would learn everything I need on the job.
And you’ll find that there’s a lot of stuff in the CFA exam that you’ll never ever use. For example, I’m quite certain that I’ll rarely (if ever) use derivatives. And I’ll never use the trading stuff or the benchmarking stuff in Level 3, so that is useless to me. I don’t want to understand it. I just want to pass the test.
That’s what I was thinking of doing. I will just study from the Schweser’s Notes and get further clarification from the CFAI material in case something needed more reading. Moreover, I will take the EOC questions from the CFAI books.
I was wondering, what type of study plan I should use in order to approach the material in the most efficient way? I have all summer long, and Fall semester before I take CFAI on December 6th.
I have no idea how to plan my summer accordingly. What do you guys suggest? How many hours a week? How many times shall I read the Schweser’s Notes? Etc.
I think CFA exams are the closest to reality…however, Kaplan exams might look much easier…
one can look at other options as well… I have been doing questions from a QBank Provider…www.best-attempt.com and found the content very good…I am going to attempt the mocks starting next week and hope that they will also be good…cheers!
The company has also started a new FaceBook group…they post new practice questions every day.
I’m registering for the December 2014 Level I as well. As an aside, there are two books available on Amazon that are relatively quick reads and you may find helpful –
CFA Confidential: What It Really Takes to Become a Chartered Financial Analyst, and
Direct Path to the CFA Charter: Savvy, Proven Strategies for Passing Your Chartered Financial Analyst Exams.
Reading these books made me realize that while I may be reading the material because I genuinely want to learn everything… In the end, all that matters is whether or not you pass the exam. To this effect, while I only recently began studying, I had the following realization the other day that I wanted to share.
The CFAI Curriculum is 3,618 pages. The Schweser StudyNotes are 1,563 pages.
Initially my plan was to begin studying early and read both. A few days into studying I had to ask myself the following question:
Would my time be best spent reading through the CFAI Curriculum or would it be more beneficial to read only the Schweser StudyNotes… twice… and still have 492 pages of reading left to spare?
I have decided on the latter and will spend the balance of that time towards QBank in addition to all of the Online Videos and everything else that comes in the Schweser Premium Plus Study Package. That’s my two cents anyway. Now, for Levels II and III I know that I will be reading the curriculum; however, for Level I I’ve decided against it as I believe the lost opportunity cost to be too great.
I came across Apptuto recently and I am looking closely at using them for level 1 in Dec. Looks like its like a exam prep program but across mobile as well as desktop and with much more features. A colleague at work said that question practice is most important part of the preperation.
I signed up down the bottom and I got an email back saying I am one of the free beta users for December 2014. Just saved myself $299 from not having to buy the QBank. Might as well sign up and save yourself some money as well!
I think it depends on how much smart and deductive one is. I’m giving an example:
In the last days before the exam I launched a question in panic asking “what is interest rate risk?” in Fixed Income. Because until then I had dealt with ‘reinvestment risk’ and ‘price risk’ and both (in my view) go back to ‘interest rate risk’ in the end of the day.
I received two very helpful answers which made me understood that ‘interest rate risk’ was what I call ‘price risk’. But like I wouldn’t be able to figure out this by myself, I most probably couldn’t figure out other terminology differences between Schweser and CFAI because I’m not smart enough.
I bought the Schweser Notes (Book 1-5), Practice Exams (vol 1-2) and QuickSheet. I may get the QBank this month or next month depending on how well I’m doing on the practice exams. Go for it dude.
I failed with schweser the first time. I think I did a better job this summer with Elan. Elan basically explains the stuff to you like you’re an idiot in finance which was absolutely great.
However, their customer service was really horrible. They also sent the fixed income portion of their text, problems their 11th hour 40 days before the exam date which made it really hard to try to finish the fixed income portion before then.
I would say it would be best to use a combination of Elans videos and the CFAI books. However, if you buy their books you have to buy their text as peter olinto does many of his lectures straight out of the Elan text books.
As for questions and problems just use the CFAI eocs and mocks and nothing else. Go through the examples in the CFAI books also working through them.
Might as well sign up and save yourself some money as well!