Would appreciate advice from Level 3 candidates, would I need any of the knowledge from Level 2 in Level 3, do I need to retain my Level 2 notes (would I need to refer back to them)?
And is there any overlap in any of the topics like there was between Level 1 and 2, in FRA for example.
Thanks!
No not at all - just Ethics really
Ethics, Gips in level 1, AMC, if you had that in level 2 this year. Some of it in Econ, equities, portfolio management. But I did not really refer back to my notes from last year. You will have to write new notes anyways.
I believe I will fail in a high band, so please take this with a pinch of salt.
Directly: Ethics, H-Model, Cobb-Douglas, Taylor Rule, Gordon Growth, Std. Dev, Sharpe and Treynor Ratio, Covered Interest Rate Parity, Interest Rate Options, etc.
However, the context of these calculations are from an entire portfolio so you’ll still need to learn new applications. Also, overall these are most likely a small part of the overall exam. New concepts like individual and institutional investors; risk, derivative, and option strategies; and behavorial finance and trading strategies are a much larger part.
Indirectly: Most of what you learned will be tangentially discussed or built upon. If you’d like to cheaply peruse the material you can buy prior year’s Schweser’s Secret Sauce on Amazon for $35 or these notes are free. Good luck bud.
I went back and looked at old notes for some of the stats stuff (relationships and conversion between std dev / covariance / correlation / whatever) but I would really just focus on learning from the material they give you. Outside of the economists, the authors explain the material well.
On the note of lvl 2 topics to review - I would definitely spend a lot of focus on anything that you recognize from prior levels. Pretty much all of those topics came up repeatedly in CFAI topic tests or the past AMs they release.
Thank you hhcave, I-will-pass, CFAbeatmeup especialy for the details, and hockl 
just want to know, will there be plug and chug type concepts like in Level 2? Is the Level 3 PM paper similar to the difficulty of the Level 2 item sets?
You’ll want to retain your L2 notes for when you have to re-take L2 next June.