So the results are finally out and its time to digest the information given. I was fortunate enough to pass this level 3 beast and I wanted to pass something back to this forum for all the help, support, and encouragement I received from here. I first want to encourage anyone at this level NOT to give up! Your honestly SO close to the finish that throwing in the towel now would undermine all those hours and years we all spent to get this far. If you were in level 1 or 2, I would say maybe its worth throwing it in but to throw it in on the final stretch would be tragic. This is not a one size fits all, but a different study plan on how you can successfully pass this exam and I hope reading my experiences here would help you all pass this program. First, I have never read the CFAI text books (except for ethics) because it was just too much and I didn’t have the time to go through all that fluff. I initially used Schweser for level 1 and level 2 (first attempt). I decided to try Stalla for my second attempt at level 2 and I was very happy I made the switch and very happy with the outcome. Even with Stalla, I didn’t read the entire books they offered, I only referenced on areas I needed a little more detail. Below are what I think are the essentials to successfully passing these exams (in no particular order): 1. Schweser secret sauce: (amazing summary of all the core concepts you need for each CFA level exam). I actually passed level 1 reading exclusively this only and I was band 10 for level 2 (first attempt) reading ONLY the secret sauce. Don’t leave home without your secret sauce (or your study plan!) 2. Stalla lecture notes: I found these extremely helpful and I swear by them. The core of my studies was using the lecture notes for my second attempt at level 2 and my first and final attepmt at level 3. The videos that come with the lecture notes are very well done and really make the concepts easier to understand. The ONLY lecturer on the CD’s I found to be completely useless was Ben Jones. Otherwise, they were all very good (espicially Peter Olinto and David Hatherington). If you master the lecture notes, I strongly believe you will pass the exams. I think lthe lecture notes give you about 80%-85% of the material you need in each section and filters out A LOT of the fluff in the CFAI text. 3. Schweser exams and Q-bank: This is very I found Stalla to be lacking. The questions in PassMaster are not the same calibre as the Schweser question banks. I went through all the PassMaster and then went right into the Q-Bank. 4. Know your ethics! This was the only section I went through Stalla, Schweser and the CFAI text. Ethics can in some cases make or break your results. Bottom line is that with these 4, I think you chances of passing this exam would be high. Again this is not a one size fits all, but I found this method to be very efficient and allowed me to use my limited time to concentrate on the heavy weight areas. I stress again that I never touched the CFAI textbooks (except ethics) and used the Schweser/Stalla big heavy books for reference only. The bulk of my studying was either with the Secret sauce from Schweser or Lecture notes/video from Stalla. To give you all perspective of what I had to go through for the level 3 exam when I passed using the Stalla lecture notes, while studying for the CFA level 3 exam I was also doing my MBA part-time at a top school in Canada, working full time (3 hour commute each day), with a 1 year old at home. I really did not have the luxury of time so I managed to make the most of it by trying to be as efficient as possible. It was by far the hardest thing I have ever done when I was doing this all at once but it was definitely worth it to get through it all. I’m just writing this to show that even if you are time constrained, you CAN study effectively and beat the CFA exam. Finally, there were two things I always considered in my study for the exam and I think this also helped me focus on the big picture: 1. To pass the CFA exam, you don’t need to be an expert in all fields, you need to be a jack of all trades and master of none. What it means is that as long as you know about 80% of the concepts in each area, its better to sacrifice the the remaining 15%-20% in each area in order to make sure your 80%-85% in all the areas. 2. If you look at past exams and CFAI sample questions, I found that out of the 6 questions in an item set, 2-3 were “freebies” and the remaining ones were the more difficult/challenging questions. By ensuring you always got those freebies you automatically had nearly 50% of an item set and could get the remainder by knowing the concepts in greater detail. In this case, knowing 80%-85% of the material was definitely enough to give you that. So I rather spend the 200-300 hours studying the Core concepts than wasting it on obscure sections that may never show up. Disclaimer: Will the method I used to pass the exams give you above 70% in all of the sections? probably not. Will you have below 50% in a few sections? probably. Will you end up passing? Highly likely. I hope this was helpful to anyone reading this. Remember don’t quit, your VERY close to the finish line and I think its definitely worth sacrificing a little time to get through this and finally get that elusive charter. I’ve reposted my results below for each time I wrote the exam (the ones I found on AF). As you can see, I never killed the exams, but I never got destroyed either with this method. Best of luck to all next year and congratulations to all who passed this year. Deep2002 Below is my level 2 (first attempt using Schweser secret sauce only + Q-Bank and ending up as band 10) results: Item Set Q# Topic Max Pts <=50% 51%-70% >70% - Alternative Investments 18 - * - - Corporate Finance 36 - * - - Derivatives 36 - - * - Economics 18 * - - - Equity Investments 72 - * - - Ethical & Professional Standards 36 - * - - Financial Statement Analysis 72 - - * - Fixed Income Investments 36 - - * - Portfolio Management 18 * - - - Quantitative Methods 18 - * - Below is my level 2 (2nd attempt using Stalla lecture notes and a little secret sauce on the side + Q-bank) results: Item Set Q# Topic Max Pts <=50% 51%-70% >70% - Alternative Investments 18 - - * - Corporate Finance 36 - - * - Derivatives 36 - - * - Economics 18 - - * - Equity Investments 72 - * - - Ethical & Professional Standards 36 - * - - Financial Reporting & Analysis 72 - - * - Fixed Income Investments 36 - * - - Portfolio Management 18 - - * - Quantitative Methods 18 - - * Below is my level 3 results (using Stalla lecture notes/video and Q-bank): Essay Q# Topic Max Pts <=50% 51%-70% >70% 1 Portfolio Management - Individual 35 - - * 2 Portfolio Management - Institutional 25 - - * 3 Portfolio Management - Institutional 24 * - - 4 Economics 14 - - * 5 Portfolio Management - Asset Allocation 15 - - * 6 Fixed Income Investments 18 * - - 7 Portfolio Management - Risk Management 20 * - - 8 Portfolio Management - Monitor&Rebalance 17 - * - 9 Portfolio Management – Performance Eval. 12 - * - Item Set Q# Topic Max Pts <=50% 51%-70% >70% - Alternative Investments 18 - * - - Equity Investments 36 - - * - Ethical & Professional Standards 36 - - * - Fixed Income Investments 36 - - * - Portfolio Management 18 * - - - Portfolio Management - Individual 18 * - - - Portfolio Management - Risk Management 18 - * -
Sorry forgot one last important point. Pay to get those CFAI online sample questions/mock exam. They are worth their value in gold! I found them to be very helpful in every level and was a good way of separating my weak areas from my strong areas. Thank yoU AF for having this site for all us CFA wannabes to have a place to discuss concepts and questions and meet others that ‘get’ what we are studying and wasting hundreds of hours on! Deep2002
congrats bro. I wasn’t lucky this time around.
Very helpful post deep2002. I used Stalla lecture video for level 1 and level 2 and found Peter Olinto and David Hetherington to be very good. I know that Peter Olinto does not feature in level 3 video series. I have also heard that David Hetherington covers about 80% of the level 3 videos. If that is the case, I guess it is worth the money. Do you know if there is a way to find out who is in the video series before buying the materials? Thank you.
Thanks for giving your advice. I have been mulling over what I should do as I failed miserably. I have a one year old too though I’m guessing you are not the primary caretaker. (I’m the mum, my partner’s a doctor who works out of normal hours often). However, as you can imagine there’s not much time to study. Did you ever use the schweser videos? I paid for them this exam but never got the time to use them.
cfaboston28 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > congrats bro. > > I wasn’t lucky this time around. Boston, I was really hoping you be on the pass side too because you knew your stuff and you were the one answering all the questions (and being right!) near the end. I think it must have been close and probably just luck and lack of time on the exam more than anything else. I hope your not too discouraged because it was not about you not knowing the stuff, just a bad flip of the coin. The good thing is that 2011 doesn’t seem to be too different than 2010 so your study would only be complemented and it should be easier to get through the material and have more time to review. If you never used the video lectures before from either Schweser or Stalla, definitely try them. I’ve never tried the Schweser videos so I can’t say anything about them, but the Stalla videos were critical to my studying plan and the lecture notes are small and filled with important information so I even used them as quick readings anytime I had 15-20 minutes to spare. I also prefer Stalla to Schweser because I think CFAI does target these study providers and I think Schweser is more of a target to them than Stalla (it could just be my conspiracy theory). There is such a large amount of information that it is just not possible for CFAI to test it all in 6 hours. So they usually concentrate a bulk of their material on the main topics/points covered in those videos. For the variety and spice, you will see the CFAI put an item set or two on the exam that is more obscure just to separate the pack. But how much of the overall marks are in 2 item sets? With the freebies you should still get some marks and be able to get around or close to 50%. If 2 item sets represent 10% of the exam, you get around 4% of it, to me it is worth sacrificing that (even 10%) to make sure you know the rest of the 90% really really well. This was my rationalization and this was why I kept my main focus on the key areas and why I’m a big advocate for the lecture notes. Once you’ve really mastered the big areas, if you have time at the end, then its worth expanding and tackling the more obscure topics. I hope you don’t quit now and write this beast again next year while its still fresh and the topics haven’t changed much. If I was a gambling man, I would bet you beat it next year 
d31dy, I don’t know who would be the lecturers but you could phone Stalla and they should tell you who does the videos. I think it will be David Hatherington and Ben Jones but David does about 80% of the lectures. This was how the lectures were set in 2009 and in 2010 it was the same. Since the topics didn’t change much for 2011, I would say that it would be the same lecturers. David is amazing and he really makes sure you know what to focus on with his famous “no excuses” he throws in every once in a while. Timi, I was not the primary caregiver and my wife was amazing and extremely supportive. With my daughter, it was more spending the time with her before I went to study which was hard since I didn’t want to miss those precious moments with her. My weekdays were like this: wake up at 6:45, get to work by 8:30, be home by 6:45 pm, spend time with my daughter and family until about 8:30, study/school work until 11:30 and repeat. The weekend was waking up at 7:30 (got to sleep in haha) to go to MBA classes every other weekend for the full day. It was the most difficult thing I have ever done and I hope I never ever ever have to do it again like this. If you have 10-14 hours in a week (1.5-2 hours a day), that is all you really need to study for this over 4 months (in my opinion). It took me about 6 weeks to go through all the videos so I had 2.5 months of pure review and doing questions so I didn’t feel rushed near the end. I don’t know about the Schweser videos since I have never tried them, so I can’t comment on it but I can say that even if you decide to read the entire schweser book/stalla book, you should FIRST watch the videos and then read over the books because this way you can concentrate on the areas missed in the videos to get more out of your plan overall and you can see how thorough the videos are. I never bothered reading the CFAI/Stalla/Schweser books because I didn’t have the time and I was scoring around 65%-70% on most of the exams I took so I figured I was ok on the main concepts. Hope that helps deep2002