First of all, congratulations to all those who made it through the level 2 exam! It has been a tough journey of months, for some, its years and the journey was well worth it. For those who did not make it, especially those in band 9 or band 10, I know it must be difficult. You guys were so close! My advice would be to take 1 or 2 months off to relax, recharge and start again and rethink your studying strategy and work on improving the weaker areas. The following is my personal opinion and advice which I hope can inspire others facing the exam next year.
With a tremendous amount of luck and studying, I passed this exam in my first attempt. I was shitting bricks before I got the results and CFA institute being almost 5 hours late didn’t help! Here is my journey:
I started studying seriously in the beginning of February so I had 4 months. In hindsight, I wish I started in January but I could not find the motivation haha. However, I was lucky to be able to cut my hours severely so I was only working 2 days a week until my exam (I am a database administrator for a small department in a private insurance company).
First read through (February)
I got the 2016 Schweser books because they were cheaper and started reading one chapter. I then realized it was too slow to be reading through each chapter individually so I ditched that idea. Instead, I opted for reading through the summary of each chapter instead and writing it down. The way I organized myself was to have 5 folders, and each folder had their own respective books’ notes in it. For example, FRA and corporate finance had its own folder and so on. I’ll then have the summary of each chapter in that book in that folder(you get the idea) I then copied the summaries from schweser. The way I did it was writing each LOS and drawing a square around it and draw a few columns on a page and try to fit the summary into one page or 2 pages. 2 or 3 columns and a few rows of boxes so that the page is filled up with summary. The point of this is to help with retaining information. Its much easier to pull out these single sheets and revise. It especially helps as the exam draws nearer and nearer and you can save a lot of time revising since everything is organized rather than pulling out books and looking for that specific chapter. I then did the EOC from all the chapters after completing the summary. Same concept, I stapled another sheet of paper behind my summary and wrote down all the answers. For the ones that were incorrect or ones I guessed, I will write down the explanation and again drew little boxes around to organize it. Again, the point is to look back at these notes and have “aha” moments at ones that you got wrong. I got all this done in 1 month’s time.
2nd read through(March)
When I started the 2nd round, I felt as though I was starting out brand new because I completely forgot what I have learned in the first round! Don’t feel stressed out, this is very normal if you’re trying to learn something new. You need at least 2 more rounds of revisions followed by a ton of questions(at least 1000) and quick skimming through of the notes and memorizing a ton of formulas. For the 2nd round, I spent more time on actually going through the Schweser notes page by page. You now have the summaries written out and you can now see how all the parts fit based on the summary. You are now consolidating. Rather than spending 2-5 months doing a deep read through on the first round and forgetting it anyway, do it on the 2nd round. However, something unfortunate on my part happened, I checked the 2017 syllabus and lo and behold, there were some changes made. I lost a week rewriting new summaries on chapters that were added on to portfolio management and I had to dump some of my summaries from FRA. I also had to rewrite my notes on derivatives because it got consolidated and new chapters were added. After this, I went through and marked each LOS as I completed them. I added another sheet to my existing summary sheets and wrote down examples for each LOS. This will be 2 to 3 sheets per chapter. Then I redid the Schweser EOCs and wrote down my mistakes again. My scores for the EOCs did improve a little. I spent a lot of time working on FRA, Equity and Derivatives (swaps are terrible, especially foreign exchange swaps!).
3rd round (April)
Did the same thing as round 2 except that I didn’t rewrite the examples from the LOS. I spent a lot of time memorizing and understanding examples and I focused more on the heavy hitting topics in FRA and Equity and quite a bit on derivatives because its complicated. My biggest weakness at this point was FRA. Pension(IFRS vs GAAP), intercorporate investments(stupid 3 types of securities and how they were recorded, and equity vs acquisition method with full or partial goodwill compounded with IFRS vs GAAP) and multinational companies (Current vs temporal) were boring, tedious and a lot of things to memorize. My summaries on Schweser was not good enough. I had to redo the LOS in a mor organized way to truly memorize these chapters. I began searching for free videos online and I found a few gems in youtube which broke it down quite well for me. Based on the videos, I redid my notes for FRA and I began committing them to memory along with the other books but with a heavy emphasis on Equity and FRA. Everyday in the library or walking back home, I would recite everything in my head. All the formulas, procedures for each security etc. I will spend like 10 minutes reciting them and I did it 3 - 5 times a day, especially before going to bed. I then wrote up my formula sheet. and had to and did all the EOC in Schweser for the 3rd round and did CFAI’s EOC as well. I did some of the blue boxes in FRA but I ignored almost the rest.
Mock exams and endless practice (May)
I did my first Schweser mock and I got killed. I scored a miserable 55 % and I was a little worried but I remembered reading from another post that the first mock is always the worst. I did the same thing with my mocks as I did with my notes: I wrote down all my mistakes and guesses, drew little boxes and stapled it to my mock I then spent a week revising my summaries and all the LOS examples that I wrote and worked on the CFAI topic tests. The CFAI topic tests were brutal though and I didn’t do very well. I scored mostly 2-4s out of 6 on my topical tests. I did quite well on alternative investmetn and corporate finance and equity was alright but FRA killed me. Errikkson (the first one) was insanely hard, I got 1/6 haha. On the 2nd week, I did my second Schweser mock and my score was worst, 53%. At this point, I was quite stressed haha. I asked myself, how did my score get worst after one week of revising! Then 2 days later I did the live mock exam by Schweser and I did terrible there too, I scored a 54%. At this point, I thought I was going to fail. I gave myself a day off and I resumed by watching the video solutions and corrected all my mistakes. At this point, I had 3 more weeks left till the exam. I then redid the first 2 mocks and the live mock and I scored a 65%, 69% and 68% respectively. This gave me some confidence and I redid all the CFAI EOCs and did more of the reciting stuff, reciting the mistakes I made, all the formulas and all the procedures. I had 3 weeks left and my plan was to revise for 3 days doing EOCs and reading through my notes, memorizing them and do mocks and review mistakes on Thursday to Sunday. Somehow things started coming together for me because I did my 4th mock (exam 3 in book 1 of schweser) and I got a 67%. I kept up the pace and I scored a 68% and 69% on the 2 mocks in book 2. On the last week, I had one more schweser mock left and the official CFAI mock. Things were going well and I felt confident but then I read soem posts on Analyst forum saying its important to do the topical tests. So I revisited the topical tests and still got my butt kicked by scoring mostly 2-4s and a few 5/6. I then did the official CFAI mock and halfway through, I just gave up because it was so difficult. It was unlike the Schweser mocks that I have been doing all these time. Where Schweser mock was pretty straightforward, the CFAI mocks were tricky and you had to dig around for information and derive quite a few things. I felt the topical test were similar but not as bad as the mock. I scored a 50% + on the morning session and I stopped doing it. I just looked at the solutions in the evening session adn tried to understand the solutions. I was pretty sad in the last week because UI thought I would do well in the official mock. I did well in the level 1 official mock so level 2 was a bit f a shock to me despite all the studying. I didn’t even do the 6th Schweser mock because I was so depressed lol.
Exam
Turns out, the exam was very similar to Schweser mock exams. Thje topical tests and official mock were way more difficult than the actual exam. In topical tests and official, you had to dig around so much to find the inputs to the solution and the wording was so ambiguous. However, in the real exam, the vignette was very friendly, with each successive part of the passage referring to the inputs you need for that particular question. It felt almost like level 1, where everything is given and you just need to solve it, very similar to Schweser mocks that I have been doing. For the morning session, I finished it in 2 hours and in the evening, I finished in 1 hour and 40 minutes.
Advice
- Don’t be affected by all the posts in Analyst forum. Some of the people here will post that they scored a 75% to 80% in their mocks and that they are worried that they will fail. Either they are trolls, or they just need a good kick in the butt because if you’re scoring that high, you might as well go on vacation. Some people posted that the official mock was easy and they scored 80% and that the official mock was very similar to the actual exam. Don’t be affected by them. Schweser mocks are a very good proxy for the actual exam and if you are scoring 65-70% consistently, then you should have a good chance of passing.
2)Have a system in place to help in quick revision. HAving written notes down helps with quick revision instead of pulling out books.
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Embrace your mistakes and errors. look at them as opportunities to learn and see which are that you are weak in. Don’t be too discouraged by them, instead, enjoy them as they are good learning experiences. Write them down and staple it to your mock. Write them down and compile them into separate sheets of paper for each book. Example, mistakes for FRA sheet, mistakes for Equity sheet etc. Its very easy to look through all the mistakes you made if theyre well organized into separate sheets.
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Memorize the formulas early. Some might say its not a good idea, but in my opinion, you should try to memorize the formulas a month before the exam. It helps to bring everything together. It will also help in solving questions quickly in mocks
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If you can afford it, get the Schweser videos. They’re very helpful in breaking down more difficult and abstract concepts.
Overall, the chapters in level 2 is not too difficult to understand on a chapter by chapter basis. Its pretty straightforward mostly. The challenge comes in containing that massive amount of information in a given timeframe. If you work full time, it will be more difficult. If you work full time , have kids and a wife/husband, it will be even more challenging. My advice for those working full time is to start very early, learn new chapters on the weekend and spend the whole weekday consolidating on that chapter.
Good luck!