I am done with Equities, Alternative Investments & Economics and was looking to move on to the next topic. I reckon that most people find FSA to be a tad difficult and portfolio management to be quite tricky so I was planning to keep them for last. I reckon this is a subjective question and can differ from person to person but still how would you rate the L2 topics in increasing order of difficulty? Thanks, DD
why would you wait and put fsa for last? the two highest weightings are FSA and Equity. I will be spending the most time on these. starting them early and making sure i have these two and Ethics down PAT come exam time. quant and econ are most difficult for me, but i wont spend too much time trying to score over 70 on them.
I really disliked all the additional ethics stuff. Soft Dollar and Research Objectivity stuff really pissed me off since I never really have to deal with the ethical scenarios they’re using as examples. What’s so bad about FSA? Not doubting, just haven’t gotten to it yet.
pension accounting sucks, the rest of it seems ok to me (FSA)
The difficulty in FSA lies in the amount of arbitrary details. This doesn’t allow for the information to be as readily compressed and distilled into deeper principles as easily as in quant or ethics.
i’m almost at the half-way point through the material and fsa was by far the biggest hurdle so far i’m at the beginning of equities and it’s not too bad, but people tell me it’s going to get disgusting
equities isnt too bad if you get the FCFF/FCFE and Residual Income stuff down. its all very similar and incorporates discounting cash flows like the DDM. FSA seems to be more of a challenge for me so far.
only up to the beginning of FSA, but it’s anything like level 1, it’s (luckily) the smaller topic areas like econ and quant that give me headaches. I seem to get FSA and equities but i understand level 2 is a different beast.
I had a lot of trouble with the foreign exchange relationships including understanding the asset market approach. Also, when I first started I had trouble with forward rate agreements, swaps, and caplets. The FSA doesn’t seem as bad this year but its still tough. I thought I understood PM but on the real exam it was very difficult. Ethics is also tricky because I often feel like it could be either of 2 choices For me, I know I could do well if the exam were given on separate areas, but what I have trouble with is remembering and understanding all the details of the vast number of topics on exam day. You have to know it so well to get it right on the exam
depends on your background. I found FRA rather straight forward but struggled with econ(currency exchange)
International Asset Pricing is kicking my arse right now
How about Corp Finance? How did majority feel about it?
i like OP’s strategy of leaving trickier stuff for later. scan it now if you want. but some of the stuff didn’t stick early no matter how many times i looked at it. i could remember 2 minutes later but the next day i was lost again. i found FSA was like that and retention does get much, much better when you get closer to exam time. comments on all 10 sections PM - nitty and long for the amount of marks. only section i’d highly recommend CFAI readings as the core reading. fixed income - most of it is pretty straight-foreward. later parts get nitty but not too difficult. there’s alot of stuff econ - pretty easy. that national income chapter is nitty and seems like perfect “blow people out of the water” section. people will have no idea on “indirect subsidies or whatever it was” equities - mostly easy… emerging markets valuation was ridiculously painfull. derivatives - much, much easier with schweser. CFAI is tough reading. free marks basically if you do the work and understand it. corporate finance - pretty easy… although for some reason a section i read early and then overlooked for a long time. ethics - not too bad. the main section is easy. later sections are somewhat painful. quant - difficult. schweser is much, much better. took a long time to feel comfortable. those later sections could be pretty hard but alot of the questions on test are asking what correction method to use. i mean, can’t an english major memorize durban watson for autocorrelation (i suppose you might have to identify autocorrelation) FSA - pensions and translations are difficult, i found… what was the 10th category? i thought it was asset valuation or management or something. maybe alternative investments. anyway, real estate and hedge funds is pretty easy, although i screwed it up on exam. here are things i gave up on studying in a highly detailed manner: detailed emerging markets valuation. look it up if you have time. more detailed pensions and options compensation. just way too much detail. questions didn’t touch on it at all but i guess they could have. but i’d say it’s practically unlearnable even if they were the only subjects tested and you studied for a month. that national income chapter- for some reason it didn’t stick for me. probably just about the last chapter i had a detailed look at (5 weeks before exam). i think my brain was full. i can’t emphasize enough to read chapters over and over again (better if you have schweser). i hear people doing all the readings 4. 5 months. i’d do them much quicker and then do them again. photocopy the summaries at the end of each reading, put them together in a booklet and look it over again and again.