I’ve been through Book 2 of Schweser material once and am revising it for the second time. Try as I may, I just cannot digest the language of the Economics material. It is far too convoluted and tries to compress a lot of things in less number of pages. I just finished reading Demand and Supply Analysis - The Firm and almost gave up in disgust.
I cannot positively finish any reading until I have a couple of cups of coffee. I need an alternate material for revising Economics. I have two choices for now - Greg Mankiw’s Economics Text or the CFA syllabus. Please advise which would be a better choice, or even any third alternative if possible.
cfa syallabus…everything is explained pretty clearly there…i had economics in high school and i hated it because the books i used than didnt get anything into my mind and many of my uncleared eco concepts from back than are being cleared now…wish i used this book in high school
what I am doing is reading the schweser notes and refer back to CFAI curriculum if I can’t understand. But you are right, I also feel schweser alone for economics is not quite enough for me as well. I’m tempted to read the CFA curriculum through if i can squeeze out some more time.
Simply put, Greg Mankiw’s econ texts are awesome. I used his Intermediate Macroeconomic Theory text as an undergraduate student and his Principles of Economics text when I taught labs in grad school. You will be hard pressed to find a bigger Mankiw advocate on this forum. That being said, I think you will find the CFAI text to be of greater use in your preparation because its content is geared towards passing the Level I exam, whereas Mankiw’s Principles of Economics is a broad economics text. As for additional resources, Investopedia has free study guides for the the CFA exams. As far as free materials go, I would consider these top-notch.
@ofthedivision17. I agree. I’m hesitant to use Mankiw (even though it is one of the BEST eco texts I’ve read) because there is a possibility of missing out some of the LOS prescribed for the exam. So I think I’ll stick to the CFAI texts.
While browsing through Investopedia, I found a few mistakes in the numerical examples (from quantitative methods), so I’m not too keen on using Investopedia as my sole reading material
Everyone’s strengths and weaknesses are different but i honestly don’t find economics is a tough topic to digest, however, if you’re stuck on any particular theory or formula, i would just go to investopedia and look for definitiion. They usually have very detailed definitions and perhaps you understand it better there!
Just to be clear, I would not recommend using Investopedia as your primary resource; however, it’s great for definitions and basic concepts. Sometimes it helps just to see something worded differently. Good luck!
EDIT: Mankiw does an excellent job of explaining the IS-LM model (much better than CFAI, in my opinion); however, IS-LM is a topic in Intermediate Macroeconomic Theory (not Principles).
I enrolled for CFA Level 1 June 14 exams a couple of weeks back and was using Schweser for a base for my study. I have an Under Graduate Degree in Business and an MBA in Investment Management. But try as I might, I cannot for the life of me comprehend Schweser’s Econ Text. It is just way to compressed to explain any real concepts and just skims through the syllabus. I think I will have to use CFAI book completely for Econ and just solve Concept Checkers at the end of chapters from Schweser’s
Thats true for me too. I am not from finance background, and currently preparing for June level 1. I am not at all able to understand eco from schweser, CFAI book is much better. However, I have a doubt here. Reading from CFAI book would take more time. I heard from somewhere that since eco is small percent in the exam, its not worth spending so much time to read a whole CFAI book for it. How do you guys manage that?