If you’re that worried about an exam that’s a full year away, you should plan to get GMAT and TOEFL done ASAP; you have nearly 2 months before you could even sign up for CFA L2 anyway, might as well be efficient. If you needed 400 hours for L1 and feel that was time well spent, you’ll need at least that much, if not more, for L2.
I think a general rule of thumb is twice what you spent for L1, given that you put in 400 for L1 I don’t think you will need 800 but I would not be suprised if you needed close to 600. I spent nearly double on L2 and perhapse a better measure is that I made more than double the number of note cards I did for L1. However I think focusing on the GMAT/TOEFL first is probably a good idea. You can spend some serious time with that right now and get around to CFA later in the year and still have time to fit it all in.
Thanks for your responses, I will treat 800 hours as an upper bound of my preparation, and a benchmark for the time needed.
I’ll use 4 months for GMAT and TOEFL combined, and then starting in October use remaining 8 months for CFA level II. With 800 hours assumption I will devote nearly 24 hours/ week for CFA level II.
These numbers are insane, you shouldn’t need more than 300-400 hours of good study. I prepared for L2 starting in Late Feb, working full time and probably put in close to but not over 300 and I felt pretty prepared for that exam. This is also coming from someone who has never taken an accounting or economics class. That being said, depending on how good your english is, you may need some extra time.
HAHA about the H model. That showed up in the curriculum, and I was like, didn’t I learn that at L2? Good thing it was easy to resurrect, because I did forget the exact formula. “DDM plus half the difference”