If you don’t have the backgroup (undergrad in finance, working in the field, MBA, etc), it’s a lot harder to pass with just Schweser. I’m using the CFA books, but as mentioned above, they are very time consuming. All the questions will come from the CFA books so devoting all the time necessary to go through them seems worth it to me. If you just started studying this month and you are planning to go through all of the CFA books, you should consider either taking a course or spending as much time as necessary (probably more than 15 hrs/week). In my opinion, your other option if you’re starting now is to buy the schweser notes and go through it carefully. I tell you this because a friend of mine passed LII last year with just schweser notes starting around March. However, he also has a Msc in Finance and works as an investment banker, so I’m sure that helped.
I think the exchange rate part of econ is already covered in L1. You should have skipped it.
I’m going to use both, I don’t have a background in finance, so I’m just using CFAI materials I started in Jan 20th and finished vol1,2, and start corporate finance today. I did this for level 1 then I’ll use the qbank, to solidify my knowledge on weekends. It works out to be around 50 pages a day to finish 1 month in advance at least for level 1 anyways.
I’m actually enjoying reading CFAI curriculum. Pretty good reading since my only objective is to see the big picture. I’m going to start doing long practice tests in Q-bank and Secret Sauce for review in about a month and a half and then I will focus on retention.
CFAI Derivatives is not fun. I just finished my first Qbank with intermediate/advanced and got a 47% . . . long way to go.
250 hours is not enough even for fresh graduates.
It would take me 250 hours to flip the pages without reading a single word! I guess I would need at least 750…
me too… so many pages… demoralising