21 days to go until game day and I’m a little lost on what to do to prepare at this point.
If I could get some input and advice on how some of you guys are preparing yourselfs going forward from today I’d really appreciate it!
How much have you finished? If you don’t have any other time commitment its quiet possible still, 200-300hrs should be enough, but that depends a lot on background knowledge.
I have only finished 1st 2 Study sessions(in Dec-Jan), still hoping to finish the material, i think its possible if i put in the time, and i dont have any other commitments.
My approach- After finishing a study session i solve a paper based only on that study session and move onto next, marking the ones i missed for later revision.
QBank, read through ethics again, skim FRA, mock next weekend, review things I screw up on mock.
I also didn’t spend much time on Equity or Fixed Income because I studied most of that material pretty in-depth in school, but I’ll probably spend an evening looking through each of those as a refresher.
Least that’s my plan.
The key is to focus on your weak areas i.e. the areas where there is more upside potential per hour spent working on weak areas than strong (obviously.) Also, focus on the areas of weakness that will be most strongly represented on the exam e.g. FRA, etc.
That said, don’t ignore the rest of the material. Try as best you can to keep things fresh, prefereably by doing as many questions as you can - assuming of course that by this stage you have finished the course material and have done a thorough review already.
Everyday, I’ll focus on one of the following choices and cycle through the next day.
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Just Ethics
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Just FRA
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Everything else except FRA and Ethics
I’ll set up Qbank to ask questions from one of the 3 choices above. FRA is my weakest section, so I dedicate an entire day to it.
blackomen your strategy seems risky, if you have finished the remaining areas then it’s good, because allocation-wise your strategy is- 1) Ethics-10% (My method- Just keep practicing Q’s after initial Reading) 2) FRA - 15% - 25% 3) Rest - 65% - 75% I would suggest to allocate more area on weak sections, but don’t get bogged down, leave that topic and come to it after a few days, sometimes that helps me a lot.
I guess my study plan is underweighted in the “Everything Else” part.
Unfortunately, FRA has been a bloody struggle for me no matter how much effort I put in.
Ethics has been very inconsistent (but I’m thinking of spending more time since it can make or break my score if it’s very close and the same topics are repeated in L2 and L3.)
I did a MS in Financial Engineering so the other topics have been covered in some depth… not saying that my scores are perfect but they’re at the point where the marginal benefit from any additional studying is very small. So I just go over them all every 3 days to keep the material fresh.
Maybe I should cycle through another way:
Day 1: FRA
Day 2: Quant, Econ, Corporate, PM
Day 3: Ethics
Day 4: Equities, Fixed Income, Derivatives, Alt
Note: PM, Equities, Fixed Income, and Quant are my “stronger” subjects in the “everything else” category while Derivatives, Econ, Corporate Finance, and Alt could still use more work (but they’re not as bad ad FRA.)
Sorry about late reply, and the allocation i gave were for L2, if i rem correctly (dont count on it), L1 has 20% Ethics, so almost impossible to pass without it…
For FRA i would suggest learning by solving Q’s, that’s how i prepared that and did well in it. I used to get bored in it’s theory, just made short notes on it based on Questions which was much easier. I know initially that seems impossible but Q’s on FRA are very limited in scope.
For Ethics too, solve many many Q’s. Some parts are tricky, but after practise very easy… and my friends who took it easy said exam Q’s on ethics were very hard, i had exactly opposite opinion, because if you just see & try enough questons i think not much that can be tested, only soo many situations they can come up with… For me the Q’s which came were almost identical to the ones i practised.
Best of Luck