Math course before starting CFA

Formulas for CFA1 aren’t that bad (I’m taking it in Dec). That being said, to answer your question… I took Calc and some upper level stats courses. I majored in econ graduated in May 2014 so some other math classes were scattered in there.

You need basic algebra solving for x on the opposite side of an equal sign nothing more than division, multiplication, square root, and exponent. You won’t always use it but it’ll be easier for you to know these things.

i don’t think you need a lot of quant skills for the CFAs, i personally majored in actuarial studies. i very rarely run into anything in the quant methods section that requires anything more than basic high school maths, with that being said, a lot of the concepts i.e. downside variance, etc are a lot easier to understand as i’ve done it in actuarial.

Most of the math is basic, but if you are going to take math anyways, statistics would be most helpful. The rest is basic algebra.

– I suppose most of us were exposed to Prob, Stats, and Algebra in High school. However, if you have a weak spot there, then reviewing the algebra will go a long way to managing all those equations and how to manipulate them to get what you need out of it.  
– The study material seems nearly identical to an Intro to Prob and Stats class I had.
– In addition, get some training on using the calculator, while you will still need to know the underlying concepts of the topics to know what to do, it seems to save a lot of math computation time if you can use the Finance calculator correctly during the exam.