Might as well as you L3 guys, since you’ve all passed L2.
I just started studying from the CFAI books yeserday. Started in Quant, and the reading is painfully slow. Does the average Joe with a full-time job honestly have time to get through the acutal CFAI curriculum and have time for a month of review? I feel like at this pace (though its only been two days), it isn’t possible to do.
I’ve ordered the Schweser stuff, but it’s obviousy not out yet, so I’m stuck with the CFAI books at least for a couple more weeks.
This is how I managed to get the reading done, I would do at least an hour of reading before work, during my lunch break and after work. You pretty much wont have a life until after the exam and if you pass you get to do the same thing for level III.
You probably don’t want to hear this, but I found level II much harder than level III.
There is no quick way, suck it up cowboy and get it done.
IMHO, you really dont need to go through the painfull process of reading the cfai books for level 2. The schweser notes are MORE then enough for you to pass confortably in the level 2 exam. If you really want to you can read ethics section and the portfolio management stuff from the original. These books are simply too verbose and waste tons of time with useless information.
IMHO schweser does excellent job to prepare you for level 1 and level 2 exams. I also HIGHLY recommend to supplement your schweser notes with schweser videos as they will help you loads and focussing your attention on what is important and solidifying tricky concepte. You can spend a lot of time wasted on reading useless stuff in cfai in reviewing the material and doing papers and questions. There is a ton of material in schweser and imho it covers almost everything you can be asked on exam day. I would like to warn you that you need to know everything, you have to know every word in schweser inside out and do expect questions on obscure or vaugue topics. It close to impossible to know every word in scwehser inside out nevermind the original books. So trive for 90 to 95 percent accuracy and I am sure you be fine. This is my personal experience and advice. Everyone is different. So please feel free to do what you feel works best for you. You can also check out of my poost on how i passed level 2 exam in the level 2 forum of this website. I go in depth about everything I did to pass and what i felt was important.
I have detailed stats of my study times by topic, should you care to use it to get a sense of how long it will take to get through each volume. It took me 164.53 hours to read the entire Level 2 CFAI text. By the way, these numbers are for one read-through, to include working the blue box examples, and the EOC questions one time, and I consider myself to be a slow to average reader:
11.93 hours Ethical and Professional Standards
10.75 hours Quantitative Methods
11.58 hours Economics
19.43 hours Financial Reporting and Analysis
16.42 hours Corporate Finance
38.95 hours Equity Investments
6.17 hours Alternative Investments
19.55 hours Fixed Income
17.8 hours Derivatives
11.95 hours Portfolio Management and Wealth Planning
In addition to the first read through, I read FRA twice, since it was my weakness the first time I failed L2 (Band 9). I also did all the EOCs a seconed time, did several mock tests, both CFA sample tests, and reviewed my flashcards and formulas numerous times before the test. By test time, I had studied a total of 254.1 hours. With this amount of study, I did pass the test, but I feel it was pretty close.