General Impressions

Just thought I’d share my thoughts so far and would be curious about your feedback. 1. There is a lot of trivia. This is good for me though as it is a strength. 2. There is a lot of memorization of things like return distributions, sharpe ratios, variance etc. 3. There is not that much new. Most of the stuff seems very familiar. 4. There is a lot of overlap with CFA material. I do not think I would have any idea what a lot of this stuff means, if I were only reading scheweser, as most of it is not very well explained. I think having at least a CFA Level 2 knowledge is a huge benefit. This goes beyond the ethics portion. There is lots of quantitative methods material here that you need such a background to understand meaningfully. 5. Material is far less theoretical than CFA. (which is refreshing actually)feels a bit more like a professional exam than a college Econ course. 6. Much more USA-centric than CFA. Although it does pay some attention to emerging markets it’s primary focus, and probably rightly so, is the US and Europe. For level 1 I found the schweser material very basic and found the test quite challenging. I expect the same here. I think a good knowledge of the trivia + educated test taking strategy from CFA should get me through this. I do not think Scweser EOC questions are at all demonstrative of actual test questions.