If you were to get one topic out of the way..

This is for all of those that have gone through the curriculum.

I mean over the next few months. I just recently passed the 1st level and although I dont want to *start studying*, I dont really want to slow down either as I find it takes me way to long to get into study mode.

FSA

Equity or FSA, but there’s no way you’ll retain everything over the next 10 month. You could knock it out then review it every 3 months.

FI. Swaps. Know that well. Equity & FSA are more basic.

Ethics. Even though it wasn’t that tough, it holds too much weight for something so subjective

While I know what the spirit of this post is getting at, I’ll just say that you really can’t get any topics “out of the way” UNLESS you work professionally in that area or have a particular knack for something. My recommendation is that the “out of the way” issues will be determined when you take practice exams 2-3 months ahead of time and can identify your strengths.

There is no one topic that “one should get out of the way”.

jalmy8 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > There is no one topic that “one should get out of > the way”. Very true… To all newbie Lvl 2: First off congrats on passing… Secondly, there is no “one” topic that anybody should try to get out of the way… unlike level 1, there are only 120 questions and therefore you need to be on top of your game in every topic! I admire everybodys enthusium (sp?) on starting the study process for the level 2 exam so early, but get real about this… this is a much more complicated test than the level 1 exam and you need to weight the risks of complete burnout by Feb. against the reward of “hoping” you will have a better idea of what will be asked come June…

while i agree that there is no getting anything “out of the way” at level 2, i get what you are saying. my advice would be Quant. Quant is really not that complicated at level 2 - its just time consuming, and in the face of denser, heavier weighted sections, it gets put on th back burner (at least in my experience). if you take the time to learn regression and time series now, and have plenty of time to read through everything a couple of times and get your arms around the concepts, it should be a section that will worry you less going into next June. You will still have to revisit it a LOT near the end because there is quite a bit of “memorization” type material in there (how to recognize problems with your model, a few formulas, etc.), but if you can have a handle on the basics you will be in good shape. i felt really good about quant until a week before the test because i spent a lot of time on it, but didnt review it like I should have, and walked in on test day pretty terrified of that section. Luckily, it wasnt tested very heavy, but you cant count on that.

Of course after learning all that cool quant you may only get one vignette on how to calculate covariance like we did. :frowning:

If I were to have started earlier on anything it would have been Quant and Derivatives. For me those took a bit longer to get through and understand 1st time around. 2-3 weeks each in my case. I don’t deal with heavy Quant or Deriv’s in my business so it should be quicker for a lot of you that do specialize in that. If you can get a decent handle on those, revist often through your studies, and spend a lot of time just prior to your exam it should help out quite a bit, and you can save valuable time taking practice tests and revisiting your weak areas.

yeah, derivatives is scary. too scary.

Dont even skip the balance of payment accounts in economics :stuck_out_tongue:

My congrats as well to the new L2 candidates, hopefully I won’t be among you next year. As for what topic to start: while FSA and Equity are the obvious ones, if you are following a program by any of the service providers they will probably spend sufficient time on these two. jmho, it wouldn’t be one but rather the combo of quant, derivatives and PM, for these reasons (but only if you care lol!) Quant - if you don’t have the background it’s tough, even if you do there are sections you will have trouble comprehending…plus it shows up in other sections (like PM) Derivs - yeah, the weighting is small but the concepts are extensive and by the time most programs reach this section you are reaching the burn out phase. look at the posts for May in the past years, lots of people start trying to game the exam and choose to ditch Derivs as its the most time consuming for the given level of points. PM- Stealth topic, keeps getting shrugged off, candidates claim they know the stuff and then crash on exam day because none of us thought we’d see entire item sets on Efficient frontier or Treynor Black. Also, use the CFAI text, the service providers don’t spend enough time on PM as a 2 timer, it seems to me that CFAI chooses a page or paragraph from their text to test.

Research and objectivity standards.

knock ethics out of the way. it’s a brushup of level 1 with some extras on soft dollars…definitely the easier of the reads among the study sessions.

BOP obviously.