I need a bit of advice here, I signed up late for the exam and recived my books late septemeber, I am starting to freak out whenever I look at the number of days left for the exam, I am afraid that I’ll run out of time before finishing the books or in best case senario finish them only once (I am aiming for 7/11 date to finish the books), what advice do you have for me??
there are 55 readings left for me and I only have access to the CFAI books , and I can study full time but I dont have a good study schedule (If anyone would help please)
what are my chances of passing the exam there are 57 days to D-day
I have schweser qbank and planning to buy elan wild card pack (11hr + 3 mocks + formula sheet) It should arrive within 2 weeks, what do you think ? I cant buy the notes since I dont know when they will arrive and I am paying another 700$ to fly to the exam center so cash is quite tight
How should I tackle the CFAI books, I feel that they have a lot blah blah blah ??
If you are strapped for time and need to prioritise passing the exam over understanding the content, i would organise your readings according to the topic weights found on the CFAI website:
FRA,ethics,Fixed income,quant,equity,economics in this order. Remember CFAI loves ethics and you should strive to love it too. Other sections are important too ofcourse, but if you can ace the main subjects and get a reasonable grade on the rest then you should be fine.
Also alot depends on your background, if you have a business related degree,chances are you are familiar with many econ/quant some other concepts and maybe reading the EOC summaries for these topics is enough!
I would stroingly recommend keeping FRA material fresh in your memory because it is pretty cut and dry… basically go through your own notes for that topic everyday, irrespective of the reading you are currently studying.
2 weeks is more than enough for mock exams…i would imagine most of the ppl here use 2-3 days to look at L1 mocks
Thanks for the info mate, looks like I’ll be the only one who uses the CFAI books before the exam they are so stretched out, do you recommend the elan 11hr book or is it a waste of time?? i might be able to obtain the schweser work books ( they are 2 books with PowerPoint style) are they helpful?? This is getting complicated 1- cfai books 2-Elan 11hr 3-sxhweser qbank 4-schweser work book 5-mock exams 6-Schumacher videoS ( might get them form a friend) How do I make the best out of these? Or how do i organize them?? A little about me, I did my undergrad in finance, so i still remember few things ( i wants a straight A student) So what do you think??
I have never used 3rd party materials so i cannot vouch for them (got no money to buy those!), but since you studied finance before, this cuts down on a lot of cramming in my opinion.I would flip through the EOC summaries and see which of the topics are still familiar from the finance degree. You could probably do the whole of econ in one day,the whole of quant in one day.Ethics is probably easier to study from the cfai books directly, the rest just study from 3rd party materials.
You will be fine…just find the discpline to start and see through the whole shebang
Here is a study schedule that uses the CFA texts only, two schedules are included in this blog, one for someone who works full time and one who can study full time.
Ignore Schweser Work Books (waste of money and time).
I agree with a lot of what Alladin said. I suggest going through 2 readings a day (from a 3rd party material like Schweser but if you can do the CFAI curriculum, then go ahead with that). There are 67 readings. so give yourself a deadline of finishing all the reading material by early-to-mid-November. With your readings, do all EOC questions from the CFAI ciriculum (schweser might be too easy). For the ethics topic, I’d just focus on reading the CFAI curriculum alone.
Once you’ve read all the material and done the questions, you have about 2-3 weeks to do as many Qbank questions, sample tests, mock exams, etc. as possible!
Additional notes: make sure you have the right calculator, make sure you memorize all the forumals needed, AND make sure you know exactly where you’ll be writing your exam.
