Hi,
I wanted to give you guys a quick summary of what worked for me and what hopefully are useful pointers for next year’s Level 2 candidates.
Study material:
There is a lot of discussion about whether to use Schweser or the official CFAI materials. I tried to start with just the CFAI books but I quickly realized they were too wordy and time-consuming for me. I switched to Schweser and found it much easier to go over the material and retain it. Except for the Ethics section for which I used CFAI, I used Schweser as my base for all other sections.
How to use the CFAI books: I would advise everyone to get a hard copy of the CFAI books. Either pay the 150$ for the hard-copy or print them out (you get a free soft copy) if that’s cheaper for you. After going through the Schweser text for each chapter, I would skim over the CFAI text and make notes (see below) of anything that I felt was important and not covered by Scheweser. This didn’t take too long as if I a topic was covered by Schweser, I just glossed over it in the CFAI text.
Notes: Making notes is a strategy that really helped me towards the tail end of the study session during the revision time. I made super condensed notes of things (across Schweser and CFAI) that I felt are important and that I would have trouble retaining. I would advise against making this too comprehensive, I condensed my notes to 12 pages (although I did write in really small font) but I felt good that most of the stuff that I needed to know was in 12 pages.
Practice Questions: I did no (0) questions from Schweser except for the practice tests. I did the EOC mainly the item set format ones from the CFAI text 2 sometimes 3 times until I understood most of them. (There were always a few that I just didn’t get). Mark down the ones that you didn’t get fully so that you re-attempt them. Also, this ensures you don’t do the ones you understood on the first go again and waste time on them.
Blue boxes: You have to be smart about the blue boxes. Some of them are really lengthy and aren’t really that valuable for your time. I would suggest reading through the length ones to just get the concept. It’s definitely fine to not cover all of them fully, especially the really long ones.
Analyst forum: If there is one thing I would have done differently, it would have been to be more involved on Analyst Forum. It provided me a good quick distraction from my study session, look at potential common questions/concerns candidates have and hopefully be able to provide input to other candidates. For example: I found the exam tracker that Mossastic (sorry if I misspelled) put up you very helpful to level set.
Exams: I found the topic based practice tests on the CFAI website very useful after I covered a particular topic. I did these ~2 times. They basically contain questions from previous year mock tests so if you cover the topic based tests you don’t need to waste time hunting for previous year exams. Also this will save your time trying to figure out which of the questions are relevant and which are not. Obviously do the official CFAI practice exam - I would suggest a week before the actual test once your preparation is done leaving the last week for a final revision. I also did 5 Schweser practice based tests leading up to the exam, I found these useful mainly to improve and then build my confidence.
Hours: There is no substitute for hours put in. But equally important is how you spend those hours. Don’t spend an inordinate amount of time on practice exams. More than 6 IMO is overkill. Rather spend the time learning/revising the material. Prioritize you study-time based on the weighting and your comfort level with the subject material. I struggle with Financial statements so I spent 2x amount of time on that relative to equities. I roughly spent a total of 400 hours.
Hope that is helpful and let me know if any questions.
I wanted to give you guys a quick summary of what worked for me and what hopefully are useful pointers for next year’s Level 2 candidates.
Study material:
There is a lot of discussion about whether to use Schweser or the official CFAI materials. I tried to start with just the CFAI books but I quickly realized they were too wordy and time-consuming for me. I switched to Schweser and found it much easier to go over the material and retain it. Except for the Ethics section for which I used CFAI, I used Schweser as my base for all other sections.
How to use the CFAI books: I would advise everyone to get a hard copy of the CFAI books. Either pay the 150$ for the hard-copy or print them out (you get a free soft copy) if that’s cheaper for you. After going through the Schweser text for each chapter, I would skim over the CFAI text and make notes (see below) of anything that I felt was important and not covered by Scheweser. This didn’t take too long as if I a topic was covered by Schweser, I just glossed over it in the CFAI text.
Notes: Making notes is a strategy that really helped me towards the tail end of the study session during the revision time. I made super condensed notes of things (across Schweser and CFAI) that I felt are important and that I would have trouble retaining. I would advise against making this too comprehensive, I condensed my notes to 12 pages (although I did write in really small font) but I felt good that most of the stuff that I needed to know was in 12 pages.
Practice Questions: I did no (0) questions from Schweser except for the practice tests. I did the EOC mainly the item set format ones from the CFAI text 2 sometimes 3 times until I understood most of them. (There were always a few that I just didn’t get). Mark down the ones that you didn’t get fully so that you re-attempt them. Also, this ensures you don’t do the ones you understood on the first go again and waste time on them.
Blue boxes: You have to be smart about the blue boxes. Some of them are really lengthy and aren’t really that valuable for your time. I would suggest reading through the length ones to just get the concept. It’s definitely fine to not cover all of them fully, especially the really long ones.
Analyst forum: If there is one thing I would have done differently, it would have been to be more involved on Analyst Forum. It provided me a good quick distraction from my study session, look at potential common questions/concerns candidates have and hopefully be able to provide input to other candidates. For example: I found the exam tracker that Mossastic (sorry if I misspelled) put up you very helpful to level set.
Exams: I found the topic based practice tests on the CFAI website very useful after I covered a particular topic. I did these ~2 times. They basically contain questions from previous year mock tests so if you cover the topic based tests you don’t need to waste time hunting for previous year exams. Also this will save your time trying to figure out which of the questions are relevant and which are not. Obviously do the official CFAI practice exam - I would suggest a week before the actual test once your preparation is done leaving the last week for a final revision. I also did 5 Schweser practice based tests leading up to the exam, I found these useful mainly to improve and then build my confidence.
Hours: There is no substitute for hours put in. But equally important is how you spend those hours. Don’t spend an inordinate amount of time on practice exams. More than 6 IMO is overkill. Rather spend the time learning/revising the material. Prioritize you study-time based on the weighting and your comfort level with the subject material. I struggle with Financial statements so I spent 2x amount of time on that relative to equities. I roughly spent a total of 400 hours.
Hope that is helpful and let me know if any questions.