This whole topic is pointless right now. If we give advice and we fail, that pretty much means that our advice was worthless, since whatever we said to do was not enough.
Update result on my above -game plan: i passed!!! ( am 3/5/2 , pm1/0/7). Yuppy!!!
Congrats SK! Thanks for the advice. I’m trying to figure out which prep provider to use and ill take all the advice I can get.
eat a lot of oat meal and work out every f’'ing day
My Official Little Orphan Annie decoder ring says…
#TheMoreYouKnow
omg hash u killing me bro ##
Honestly, the best advice that was given and should be engrained in one’s brain is DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THIS EXAM. Many of us feel like it’s the hardest of the three, and it’s not close. The AM questions require a mastery level of proficiency that neither Exam 1 or Exam 2 require - it’s night and day different when one of the answers can be seen among 3 options, vs. no help or training wheels to locate that concept in your head.
Included in DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THIS EXAM is learning how to write and prepare for the AM exam. You don’t need to listen to some of the guys advising to take 10+ practise exams or whatever other extreme number, but you should do a “few” to make sure you understand how quick you need to move. I would allocate a target time for each main question (not sub-question) (eg. if 20 mins is recommended I would add 17 mins to my start time - you should always leave room for over allotments on tough questions, hence the 17 and not 20). Had I not allocated target times I would be lost as to how I’m doing. As mentioned above, aim to finish your prep (minus practise exams) by May so you have a month for practising/taking these past AM exams.
DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THIS EXAM
I thought L3 was the easiest. Don’t confuse that for it being easy. I also work in PM, so that helped.
Yes, you do have to know the concepts better since you won’t have an answer key to rely on, but the concepts themselves tend to be pretty simple once you’ve gotten enough practice.
Look at the guideline answers for AM Individual Portfolio Management and Institutional questions, for example. Once you know what to expect, they’re pretty easy. I would go so far as to say they’re common sense. Why does foundation A that continues to receive additional funding have a higher risk tolerance than foundation B that doesn’t*? I think most candidates could probably figure that out without reading a single page. Once you understand that, you just need to learn the expected format for answers. Keep it simple-- bullet point answers are fine. *Because Foundation A will continue to receive funding it has a better ability to withstand market losses, and therefore a higher risk tolerance. Easy.
I would advise people to look at previous year’s exams before they do any studying at all. Get an idea of what you are trying to master. Realize that for many of these topics, there’s really only a handful of issues that come up, and each year rehashes many of these same topics, over and over. You don’t need to spend 300 hours reading 3000 pages. You just don’t.
I agree with this. Once you get past the nuances of both institutional and individual PM (ie, calcualting required return, etc) they are very intuitive.