@marc
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Up6
I hate to be THAT guy, but I relied almost exclusively on the CFA curriculum for Levels 1 & 2 and I’m doing the same for Level 3. This isn’t me being preachy, I have nothing against using whatever materials you find helpful. You can read 5 books on a topic and not get a concept. But the 6th book explains it slightly differently and the penny drops. That happens all the time and I encourage people to learn from as many different sources as they find useful.
However, my advise to others is to really think about what value you will get from prep provider materials over and above the CFA curriculum. As someone who has sampled a broad range of the prep materials out there, I offer the following thoughts, which you are free to find useful or stupid, but that I wish had been provided to me earlier.
1) The exam is based on the curriculum. That is all. Are you comfortable going into an exam knowing that there were parts of the curriculum that you didn’t read? For many subjects, such as when you need to know the three versions of x, prep materials are as good as the curriculum, but why pay for prep materials when you can just read the curriculum?
2) To me, the idea that prep materials will save you time because the books are thinner is insane. It’s like a prof grading term papers by dropping them down a flight of stairs and giving the best grades to the heaviest ones that go farthest. First of all, they use smaller font and formatting. Are there fewer words printed in the Schwesser books than the CFA books? I don’t know. But whether you learn about, say, bond valuations by reading 800 words or 1000 words is pretty much irrelevant. Either you learn what you need to know or you don’t, and arguably it’s better to read a couple hundred more words and really get the concept.
3) The natural tendency for anyone is to open the box of CFA books, freak out and think “I will pay any amount of money to make these go away.” But the thing is that the books are not actually that bad (personally, I think many more people would read the books if the first topic was anything other than Ethics). The reason the CFA books take longer to read than an Archie comic is because this material is difficult, which is probably why there are way fewer CFAs than Archie comic book readers. Since you have no choice but to learn these materials, you need to ask whether prep materials do a better job of teaching you what you need to learn. In my experience the prep materials are no better than the CFA books on average. And, again, once you actually get into the CFA books, they are not really that bad.
4) Reading summary materials can be very dangerous, particularly preparing for a multiple choice exam. As I’m sure you know, answering multiple choice questions often involves eliminating one or two wrong answers (I am so old that when I wrote Levels 1 & 2, there were actually 4 possible answers per question, not 3) and getting to the right answer by process of elimination. This is where the importance of reading the CFA books really kicks in, because for many questions one or two of the possible answer (the wrong ones) are going to be terms that appeared in the curriculum and appears to be irrelevant. In fact, they were so irrelevant that the prep providers deemed them unworthy of even mentioning in their summary materials. These are important terms or topics on their own, and your certainly not going to become an expert in them. In fact, chances are that you won’t remember anything about them – anything, that is except for the fact that they are irrelevant in the context of the question staring you in the face and can therefore be eliminated as a possible answer.
In summary, I find prep materials useful. Formula sheets are a very handy time saver. Videos are helpful when you are to tired to concentrate on a reading. Audio recordings are way under-rated, under-provided and under-used (anyone else commute to work?). But I would strongly advise people who are considering not touching the CFA readings and only reading Schwesser or whatever to reconsider.
To use an analogy with which we are all familiar (or at least should be), you can pay for active portfolio management, and you might even get a little bit of alpha, but is it worth it? And are you comfortable with the idea that you could actually be worse-off than if you had just been boring and stuck to the benchmark?
Up5@diya,
@zee is right, London is the only place in the UK where you can sit the CFA exam (or at least it was when I wrote it there), which is INSANE.Sure, Canada is massive and it would be unfair to make people travel 4 time zones for a one-day exam.
But it absolutely boggles my mind that London was the only test centre for the entire UK.
Up5UPDATE: I have recently discovered FinQuiz, which produces what they call “Smart Summaries” and “Curriculum Notes” as well as an online question bank. While their product range is limited, their most expensive package is $400.
I am not yet ready to make a definitive declaration, but it is certainly possible that FinQuiz will earn my stamp of approval. This is exciting news in the sense there appears to be a prep material provider out there that really gets it. On the other hand, by being forced to admit that there is a worthwhile provider of prep materials, I may lose my entire raison d’être and be forced to retire from this community.
Up5I will share my thoughts on FinQuiz, but it’s getting late in the UK and you may be forced to attempt the difficult task of falling asleep whilst waiting anxiously for my next post, which I’m told is a thing that happens to people… or maybe that’s just something I imagined.
I’m assuming that you and @zee sleep, but that might not actually be the case. Are you like vampires, or zombies, or some such creature that are apparently the only subject that can legally appear in films these days.
Wait a minute… I think I’ve got it. Are you two the werewolves of London?
Up5I am tremendously honoured to accept this award. I am also humbled by the exclusive club of which I am now a member. There have been 43 American Presidents, but only @diya, @MattJuniper and myself can understand both the incredibly privilege and immense burden that comes with holding the office of King of the Mountain.
Up5Any Level 3 candidates studying GIPS may be interested in the GIPS handbook available on the CFA website. It’s much better than the curriculum and certainly better than Schwesser.
http://www.cfapubs.org/doi/pdf/10.2469/ccb.v2012.n4.full
@sophie, do you remember GIPS being tested in a quantitative manner? Is it an extension of the SS17 readings? Or, it is better to think of it as an extension of the Ethics readings?Up5Sorry, I thought I mentioned this before.
@ padniaki is 100% right. I will be going with mechanical pencils. I used standard pencils for Levels 1 and 2, primarily because in North America (I don’t know what it’s like in Europe), we get it beaten into our heads from about age 5 that for multiple choice exams YOU MUST USE STANDARD #2 PENCILS, NO EXCEPTIONS, NO EXCUSES. So I never thought to do anything different. In fact, when I sat Level 2 in London, I noticed that the yellow pencils that are ubiquitous in North America are not so ubiquitous in the UK – so I had to make a special request at Ryman’s because I was worried that somehow the proctors would frown upon my black and red pencils (which, by the way, I still have today – despite having moved 6 times in 5 years). However, I checked with CFAI and you are allowed to use mechanical pencils.
Actually, this brings up another point. When we lived in London, my wife worked for a very prestigious law firm by the name of Slaughter and May (note: NEVER write it “Slaughter & May” or they will come after you). Anyway, Slaughter’s had the BEST mechanical pencils with their logo emblazoned on them. I will be bringing a couple of those with me on the 1st as well as a couple that have been commandeered from my current employer. I quite like those ones as well, despite the fact that they are not emblazoned with my firm’s logo.
Up5Good news for you is that your workday is done (or at least almost done). I’ve got to walk around the office feeling like crap all day.
Up5@sam_hoosier I used the CFAI curriculum as my primary source for all 3 levels and highly recommend that approach.
Is @harshit_tahiliani correct in noting that the curriculum can be somewhat less-than-compelling or overly-detailed in places? Absolutely. I found that in such cases, I’d refer back to the relevant LOS and ask myself what exactly they intended for me to take away from this in preparation for exam day. Are there going to be questions on the exam that seem unfair because they test a relatively trivial point that was buried in the 14th paragraph of an in-text example? Probably.
However, as @Stuj79 correctly notes, CFAI write the exams, which are based exclusively off the curriculum, so there would have to be a compelling reason to use other materials – or so I believe. Indeed, I’ve found that non-CFAI materials can be detrimental to the studying process because they aren’t written in the same way as the curriciulum – ESPECIALLY the practice questions.
I guess I’d put it this way (and I’m guessing that you’re American based on the “hoosier” part of your handle, so forgive me if I’m wrong): If I were a star high school running back with dreams of playing in the NFL, I might find it an interesting challenge to take up rugby. They both require similar skills (ie. running while holding an oblong-shaped ball and avoiding getting tackled by giants) and I’d probably get the hang of it over time. And, who knows, I might pick up some technique or wisdom that would make me a better (American) football player. But would I turn down a scholarship offer from Ohio State and move to England or Australia or South Africa or wherever to learn rugby? No. The best preparation for getting drafted by an NFL team is to play college football (and, y’know, play football as opposed to playing rugby).That’s a long-winded metaphor, but I hope it makes some sense. My advice is to use the curriculum to the greatest extent possible. If you have questions about a particular section, post them in forums like this to get a sanity check from CFA survivors who can tell you not to worry about the 14 pages they spent explaining some arcane concept that is highly unlikely to get tested on exam day. But I know from my experience that I always felt better on exam day knowing that I’d covered everything in the curriculum – painful though it might have been at times.
Hope that helps.
Up5@CaptainKinnard The short answer is that I highly recommend that anyone writing a CFA exam at any level take the week before off work. Stay tuned for the longer answer in a forthcoming post.
Up4I started my MBA program as a dreaded “career-changer”. Worse, I wasn’t an engineer. Worse still, my degrees were is, ahem, social sciences (I can hardly type those words for shame). Worst of all, I had been working in the civil service (ie. I was a bureaucrat). So, it’s safe to say that I started with at least 4 strikes against me.
When I walked onto campus the first day, I hadn’t heard of the CFA program. In fact, I didn’t even know what “time value of money” was. It soon became apparent that doing an MBA was a useless exercise unless you were getting the letters after you name so you could get a promotion (in which case, taking first year finance, or first year anything, was like going back to grade school). Being able to say you had an MBA mean nothing because, what if you had taken all marketing or basket-weaving courses? To have any hope of getting any kind of job outside the fast-food industry, you basically had to have been born on Bay Street (Canada’s Wall Street) and done nothing but bond valuations since about the time you learned to walk. Moreover, if you didn’t have a CFA to back up your MBA, you were effectively making a giant contribution to your university without the benefit of a tax receipt.
I was a bit resentful of this and I struggled mightily with stats, economics, accounting and, especially, finance (basically anything covered in the CFA program) in first year. They just kicked the crap out of me. But then a strange realization came over me. First, in spite of everything, I was still standing and I didn’t want to give anyone the ability to say “well, he came to his MBA, but he couldn’t manage real business school courses, so once he did the mandatory classes, he took the easy electives in second year and did an MBA-light.” If I had been at all interested in one of the “softer” concentrations, I might have thought differently. But I had a second, even stranger, realization. I was realized that I was suffering form Stockholm Syndrome, because I started developing an attachment to my captors. I actually LIKED this stuff and I WANTED to learn more. There was also the practical consideration that, coming from a non-finance background, I wanted to prove that I didn’t have an MBA-light. I wanted the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval that could only be obtained by doing the CFA program.
To make a very long story shorter, all my second year electives were in the “Investment Banking” concentration, I wrote Level 1 in December 2007 and Level 2 in March 2008. Then life happened. My wife and I moved 4 times and live in 3 cities on 2 continents withing 2.5 years (you may recall a certain finacial crisis). Once we finally settled on a place to live (funny thing, it was the same place we were when we started our nomadic adventure), we got settled in our careers, bought a house and had kids (not necessarily in that order). Then I woke up one day and said, “There’s nothing forcing me to write Level 3, but I’ve done the first two levels and it seems like a waste not to finish this.”
And that is why I’m here today. In retrospect, I should have just gone with “because it’s there.”
Up4This is a bit of a trick poll because there is only one correct answer.
Up4You are correct, although they did face each other in 2007 as well, with Federer winning that battle. 2008 was the one that ended in pretty much pitch black at something like 16 -14 in the fifth set.
As someone who believes that Roger Federer is pretty much the pinnacle of sports (sorry, sport), this was probably the most excruciating sporting event that I have ever watched .At least of the non-hockey variety… and don’t go saying “ice hockey” because there is only hockey and it involves neither skirts nor grass (I am, after all, Canadian). Oh, and Chelsea v. Bayern in the 2012 Champions League final was also pretty excruciating, but at least that result was the one I was hoping for.
Up4@fabian The short answer is, sadly no.
The longer answer is that, while I am by nature a pack-rat with notes and academic materials, my wife simply cannot understand why I still have Level 1 and Level 2 books more than 5 years after sitting those exams. We have moved house 6 times since I sat Level 2 and at some point I was forced to jettison my notes. While my wife did consent to letting me keep my CFA books on the grounds that they may come in handy revising for Level 3, she made her displeasure rather evident each time she walked by our bookshelves. When I signed up for Level 3 and saw that there were a few Level 1 and 2 topics that weren’t covered in Level 3 – or so I thought – I made a point of throwing out the “irrelevant” books. I even went so far as to take an exacto knife (sorry, I don’t know the UK translation) and literally cut out the “irrelevant” sections within otherwise relevant books – not unlike when your cat tries to show you how much he loves you by laying a bird’s corpse at your feet. Funny story, these topics are still covered, they just get folded into the broad topic of “Portfolio Management”, so lesson learned.
I still have about 70% of my books from Levels 1 and I could transcribe my margin notes, but I’ve got to be honest and tell you that this is not something that I will do before June 1st. However, I do plan to build similar sites for Levels 1 and 2 (@christine, @zee, I’d be happy to create those as separate sections within this site), but again not until after June 1st. By which time you will be a Level 3 candidate.
Sorry.
Up4I remember watching “coverage” of the ban on the “Daily Show”. Jon Stewart reported that London’s new Mayor had outlawed the “curiously not already illegal” practice of drinking alcohol on public transit.
Up4Another apt song would be “Numbers” by Kraftwerk. However, making such a submission would involve admitting to a certain level of familiarity with Kraftwerk.
