Hello. Was hoping to receive some guidance regarding studying for level II.
I started studying for level II this monday (sept 18). First off, am I starting late? I notice people are posting questions starting in August?!?!
Also I applied the following methodology in studying for CFA level 1
Read through schweser books. Completed all the chapter example questions, End of chapter (EOC) and challenge questions at the end of each chapter. Marked the ones I had wrong or were hard to come to later.
Completed all the in chapter example questions in the real books + EOC
Review consisted of going through any sections again that I was finding difficult, review questions from the cfa website, 9 practice exams (schweser + cfa website) and memorizing all the formulas.
Can I apply the same to level 2 or should I ditch the schweser books for the real book only? Also by one comfortably should I start reviewing?
I know I asked a lot of questions. Any guidance would be much appreciated.
I think starting in October is plenty of time as long as you put in the hours. I wouldn’t rely on 3rd party stuff as much as the CFAI books. I always look at it as people trying to take shortcuts when they just use 3rd party and since the exams are even more in depth, taking shortcuts is even riskier. Sometimes it works though but i doubt it does for most people. My advice is to use CFAI as your main material and supplement it with 3rd party. Study a lot and practice a lot and you will do great. Good luck.
The exam consists of questions based off the CFAI material, not Schweser or any other prep. I went through both materials to see the page comparison for topics and for the low weighted topics (5-10%) I used Schweser if the pages were lower but not by a significant amount. I remember seeing one Economics reading in the CFAI books being like 90 pages and 6 in Schweser. I don’t trust Schweser for saying that 6 pages is sufficient to cover 90 pages. Practice is the most important here and reinforcing the practice with material to support it.
However everyone is different, people have passed with different prep sources, some people haven’t. All depends on you.
Schweser is good enough for an initial read of the material, but as you do questions both in Schweser and especially out of the CFAI text, which is where you should be focusing, you need to look back on the actual CFAI text to clarify things you are having problems with. Yes, they can use a lot of pages to explain one thing, but it is important to understand how they explain things as that is who creates the test.
Havent even started yet. I just signed up to this analyst forum thing and i see that people here have already put in the work. This is inspires me and prompts me to start my review as well.
