Hi guys, I’m behind my own schedule for various personal reasons but basically I still have left to read:
Ethics Econ Derivatives Alt Investments PM
Considering it’s already May, what do you guys suggest? It’s a juggle between reviewing prior material or learning the new material for me now. I try and study 2-3hrs a day after work and most of the day on weekends. I’m going to try and take around 3 days off in June. I’m also not someone who can just skim stuff and quickly understand the material, I usually spend more time to try and fully understand… maybe that’s why I’m so slow.
Having said that, I know i won’t have a solid grasp on everything so what’s your guys’ advice. I didn’t plan to skipping material but I really wanted to start reviewing first week of June.
thanks
There’s no way for anyone to answer this. First off, you easily have 100 hours remaining to study. Probably a lot more if you can take some time off work before the exam. So, honestly, you should be able to do it all.
Save Ethics until the end. Although a very important section, you can cram for this right before the test and do fine.
Econ you can probably get away with just doing EOC questions until you feel pretty good.
Derivatives, alts, and pm you have to know.
Or sign up for an online class and/or get other study prep material.
Or…I don’t know, man up and study?
You won’t make it unless you study your butt off for the next 6 weeks. No shortcuts can help you here. That being said, you’ve covered FRA, Equity, CF, Quant, and FI. That covers around 60% of the exam. Of the remaining topics, focus more on Derivatives and Ethics, because these can be 5-15% and 10-15% of the exam. Econ, AI and PM will be 5-10%. These are the lightest. So you could take a risk and focus on the other topics. However, by Murphy’s law, it’s entirely possible that you see 2 vignettes from topics you skipped. Hence I repeat, study your butt off over the next 6 weeks to catch up. You’re spending what, $1,000+ for registration and other study materials? And investing months of your life studying for this? Might as well do a good job at it.
I didn’t read any ethics for L1 and still passed > 70%… Nor am I reading any ethics for L2 either, and I’m still scoring pretty well on ethic mocks. If you do enough ethic questions as part of your mock exam and practice questions, you’ll score well on ethics (as with any topics).
Practice problems and mocks are key!
^That’s nice you’ve been able to cruise through Ethics but I wouldn’t advise others to take it lightly. It’s well known that scoring well on the Ethics section can be the difference between passing and failing. CFAI uses it as a tiebreaker for those on the fence.
I once had a candidate in a Level I class who planned to spend most of his time studying Ethics because it’s the tiebreaker for those on the fence.
Of course, he wasn’t going to be anywhere near the fence.
I cannot imagine to review something that I haven’t read before unless I have expert prior knowledge in this area. I wouldn’t say that OP is an expert for all these topics. On the other hand, to pass with punting all of these or left it solely to blind guessing is like a lottery jackpot but is still possible. Who knows…
There’s a lot to read and remember in Ethics. Mosaic theory? When do you need your employer’s consent for additional compensation, versus just informing them? What’s the guidance on client brokerage? You can’t possibly cover all of these by just doing mocks. Maybe <1% can, but I can’t.
My perspective is if you are low on time, you can still get a good percentage right on ethics through educated guesses. Many of the questions you can eliminate 1 choice. After you run into a few dozen practice questions, the theme is very similar. And if you spend a whole lot of time on ethics, there are questions that are so tricky you still can only eliminate 1 choice.
If you haven’t read PM, Alt, or derivatives… there’s no educated guesses. You are a 33% chance 