It seems that the CAIA curriculum requires candidates to buy one book, instead of like 5 seperate books, for the 3/10 exam. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0470694262/charteredalte-20/103-0687378-8717433 Did anyone buy it yet? I’d like to know if the book format is similar to the CFA curriculum books where there are problems in the middle and end of chapter questions with an answer key at the end.
There are actually three required CAIA-published books for L2 and one CFA book (which was part of L1 as well, I think). The three CAIA books are about $375-400 depending on where you buy them. http://caia.org/caia-program/program-materials/curriculum-readings/level2-curriculum-readings CAIA Level II: Advanced Core Topics in Alternative Investments. John Wiley & Sons. 2009 CAIA Level II: Integrated Topics and Applications. 2010 CAIA Level II: Current and Integrated Topics 2009 – 2010 Standards of Practice Handbook, 9th edition. Charlottesville, Virginia: CFA Institute, 2005 I’m going to buy the three CAIA books in a few days, once my current credit card cycle ends, so I will have an additional month to pay it off! Then I’ll actually sign up for the test in November for the same reason. Paying extra-early makes no financial sense!
you’re right ATH. i didn’t list the other two books because they’re just a collection of articles and stuff. please post when you get the Advanced Core Topics book and let us know if there are any practice questions in there. it would help alot in my decision to purchase the book or not.
I just ordered it. We’ll see how useful it is. The other two are just articles but I think they link to many of the topics and will be required knowledge even though not in classic textbook format. I’m hoping that UpperMark will capture the essence of all the required LOs in their neat-and-tidy format. It would be nice if they had just published a single text or single set of texts instead of making it seem ambiguous as to what is useful or required and what is simply distracting.
By the way, ATH, i wrote level 2 last month and probably failed. So i’m just preparing plan B when results come out on the 26th. The articles are definitely important for the exam and i totally agree with you about having only one source for materials. I think that’s probably why i didn’t do well. Plus the LOs were kinda ambiguous i felt.
I think i will stick with Schweser 
I had a chance to look at a copy bought by a colleague. I only saw the book mentioned in the topic header, i.e. did not see the other two article collections. There were no exercises. The book itself looked interesting and well written, deepening the topics in Level I. I just placed an order for it. As for the other two books, one of them is the same collection of articles as in the previous testing round. I have already collected the articles of the second book. Perhaps I try to share it with someone who has the third book, or just use Uppermark materials for the article books.
Thanks for the report, shootingstar. Too bad there’s no exercies in the book. The sample exam for level 2 last month was really weak and I was hoping problems in the book would be a better preparation for the exam.
any1 have know where to get those articles?