@jwa
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@AjFinance, @vincett – I would not rush to make a decision. I needed time to think about it last year and admittedly that came with a financial penalty, but I thnk it was right to step back and also totally reevaluate my approach to LIII. I know how you feel about CFA taking over your life; my feeling after hearing about passing this year was not one of joy really, but total relief – admittedly my views on the CFA are not wholeheartedly positive and well-trailed on this forum – and my wife was in tears because she knew she had me back! So I would take the £(no dollar sign on this mobile device) hit and really think about whether you want to proceed. I ultimately decided I would forget too much and just needed it out the way (before life/family really intervened!), but taking a year or two off might absolutely be the correct action and has proved so for some people who I work with.
I mainly echo @RaviVooda here; all very sensible advice. However, make a timeframe that works for you – I didn’t start in earnest until January this year, for example. Draw up a plan in excel to get through the readings allocating, say, one or two evenings for a shorter reading and a whole day on the weekend or a bank holiday for longer readings. Build in plenty of redundancy because ‘shit/work happens.’
For level III I would also emphasis that you cannot rely on third-party providers, you must address the source material – I made this mistake first time round because Schweser more-or-less alone had worked for level I and II.
Lastly, as well as the forum, definitely talk through concepts and discuss questions with colleagues/friends where available. Really helped me nail down a few parts I didn’t understand fully this time round, as opposed to last year when I was the only person doing LIII. Made me swallow my pride a bit also, since junior colleagues had caught up with me!
Good luck, @AlphaZa_99
@comicbookguy well done; you were a band 10 last year also if I recall? Congrats to @RaviVooda also who I saw passed. Commiserations to @vincentt
For what it is worth, while the morning session was long, I thought it was more straightforward than last year, if by no means “easy”. However, I would say that the afternoon felt significantly more difficult than last year, and most people I talked to (including some other retakers) thought the same – I can’t even remember if we’re allowed to talk about relative difficulty, but frankly who cares right now!
@RaviVooda I also find representativeness a bit confusing. Some good comments above, and I think it’s also worth remembering that (from my understanding) representativeness is about classifying new information with simple heuristics, while hindsight bias is to do with faulty processing of past results/information.
@RaviVooda – Is that the exact phrasing of the question? Is it saying there is a 95% probability that it will lose $50,000 or more on a given day? In which case there is a 5% probability that it will lose no than $50,000. I guess is is saying that on 19/20 days (0.95) or 95/100 days (0.95), the portfolio will lose more than $50,000 and therefore on 5/100 days (0.05) or 1/20 days (0.05) it will lose no more than $50,000. Seems an odd question to me, like the probabilities are the wrong way round…. I hate VAR.
@fabian – used only Schweser for LI and LII, passed both first time (looking at the score dispersion, LII was close but I would attribute that to only three months of study due to work contraints and doing the December-June back-to-back, rather than materials).
Tried Schweser-only for LIII, failed but got scoreband ten – on another day I may well have passed all three without ever picking up an official book. Certainly a couple of people in my office have done so.
I am using CFA books exclusively this time round for LIII. Will be interesting to see if it gets me over the line… or indeed if my performance suffers from this change in approach.@Alta12 I don’t want to sound complacent, far from it as a retaker, but I think it helps to think about the concepts which are clearly examinable vs. the enormous amount of esoteric material, buried in LIII as somewhat of a catch-all, but which realistically is not suitable for constructed response or multi-choice type questions. But yes, overall there is a daunting amount of material, and they’ve cut out about eight readings!
