A quick little background. I graduated with an Engineering degree but have been working in finance for about 5 years. I have never taken any formal training and/or finance class, specifically accounting.
It might be time to suck up my pride and tell myself I can’t teach this to myself. Schweser materials (videos included) did not help. I struggled with accounting at Level 1 and failed Level 2 because of FRA.
AI >70 Corp Fin 51-70 Der 51-70 Econ 51-70 Equity 51-70 Ethics 51-70 FRA < 50 FI >70 PM <50 Quant >70
I fully understand you cannot perform multiplication without understanding addition. I think my lack of foundation in accounting will continue to prevent any sort of success with CFA unless I do something about it.
Some of my options:
*Obtain Level 1 materials (Qbank), start over and try and build the foundation *Obtain additional accounting texts, materials *Pursue continuing education classes *Obtain formal pension accounting training as I KNOW this killed me
Has anyone had similar issues? Am I missing anything? Does anyone know of outside sources/tools that may have assisted? If I even considered doing this again I’ll need another accounting plan or I might as well copy and paste these results and slap “2013” on it.
While it certainty didn’t help, it’s hard to say you failed “because” of FRA. Did you literally get every question wrong?
I don’t have much of a background in accounting either. I took one class as a undergraduate and that was it. My advice: Read and reread the ENTIRE FRA curriculum. Make sure you know the key points from each chapter: how to:
account for assets (available for trading, held to maturity, etc), equity method, partial goodwill, full goodwill, joint venture)
account for foreign subsidiaries (temporal method and current rate method)
I studied accounting as my major at university and work for one of the Big 4 audit firms, yet still found the level 2 FRA material tough to understand. I don’t think it’s down to you lacking foundations as everything you need to get started is covered in level 1.
The guy above me is right, you just need to reread the topics, take notes, and really absorb it thoroughly - especially the big 3 readings (intercorporate, pensions, and multinational operations).
I would suggest starting from rereading SchweserNotes FRA till you fully understand each LOS. Don’t try too many materials at a time. Notes is already pretty clear. I just had one minor course of accounting in college and only by reading notes I scored above 70%. Don’t know about lvl2 but I will just read both notes and curriculum.
You need some confidence. Make yourself believe that it ain’t THAT hard…