CFAI Books or Schweser?

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Somethingaboutwoo

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I’ve heard reading CFAI books for L3 is the best and most effective preparation. Anyone think it’s worth it to get the Schweser books?
 
Use both. CFA books are a bit long. Schweser are good to learn the material. CFA for questions, summaries and blue boxes.
 
Sidneyrocks, first of all sidney does rock - would love to live there someday.
I felt the same way about L1 and L2 - schweser for readings, CFA for questions/blue boxes. I’ve read many threads with lots of opposing views on this. My intention was to read the CFA books for L3, but having started reading behavioral finance, it’s killing me to do so. To me, there is too much rambling. lots of blah blah blah… am i just a lazy reader? I like schweser 90% of the time, because it gives me the bullet points i need to know to understand the issues.
 
Roughly half of the survivors of Level II fail the exam. Why would you want to take a shortcut? Why study materials that are basically a distillation of the real deal?
 
Hank,
Because reading CFAI material takes too much time, time that is better spent on practice problems / tests. Schweser covers all the material you need to know and saves you hundreds of pages of reading. I used only Schweser for L3 and there was only one or two multiple choice questions that I didn’t remember reading about in Schweser.
 
If you want advice from someone who has already passed (and failed once) I’d say forget schweser except for review and go through the CFAI books, LOS by LOS. So instead of just reading it and being all blah blah blah, get a list of the LOS’s and read the material making notes of the info LOS point by point, making sure you get all the minutae. Schweser is a decent review but a poor substitute for the text.
 
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