My Decade-Long Journey To Five Million » exam

Plan For CFA Level 1 Exam Updated

5m10y — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 14:12:15 +0000

As I mentioned in my previous post, not all chapters are created equal. I’ve decided to prioritize my schedule accordingly. Consequently, I have to update my plan as well. You can see the latest version here.

Also, I’ve created a Google group for our email study group for June 2009 Level 1 exam. Please feel free to email me for membership by clicking this link! See you there!

Which CFAI Volumes Give You The Biggest Bang For The Buck?

5m10y — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 03:10:07 +0000

When I just started with my study for CFA Level 1 (June 2009), I thought I would go through the CFAI textbooks in order, saving Ethics for the very end of my study.

After seeing the CFA exam result (not mine) though, I’m thinking of, er, rethinking my strategy. The exam result looks roughly like this:

As you can see, we have a total of 240 questions for CFA Level 1 Exam. There are 36 questions on Ethical & Professional Standards. That’s a BIG chunk of the exam, especially considering that Ethics only take up 160+ pages of the CFAI Book 1, including many pages of optional materials, whereas Economics (24 questions) is one whole Volume 2 by itself with around 480 pages!

Conclusion: not every topic is created equal. Ethics is the lowest-hanging fruit of the bunch. Definitely one to read through first!

The rightmost column in the table below tells you which chapters give you the biggest “bang for the buck”; that is, the most number of questions covered by reading the least number of pages

I’m thinking that after finishing Ethics (just left with GIPS now), I’ll go to either Volume 4 (covering 32 questions), or Volume 5 (covering 52 questions). I’ll skip Economics for now–there are simply too many pages (480+) with relatively too little number of questions covered!

(And somehow I find that Economics is very, very boring. Some people may find this a surprise–but I find Ethics and Quants a LOT more interesting than Economics. Oh well.)

CFA, How Ethical!

5m10y — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 06:46:29 +0000

(EDIT: Originally this is a navigable Java applet–I removed it because it’s not working reliably enough.)

(Click here if you’d like to download the image.)

Study Notes For CFA Level 1 Posted

5m10y — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 07:06:03 +0000

This will be a living, growing document. So far the notes for Reading 5 and 6 have been completed. See it here, and let me know what you think!

Plan For CFA Level 1 Exam Posted

5m10y — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 14:12:02 +0000

I’ve posted the plan that I’ll use to prepare for the CFA Level 1 Exam in June 2009 here. This plan will be updated daily. At the end, I’m hoping to record how much time I will have spent preparing for this exam–it’d be interesting to see whether it gets anywhere near the 250 hours figure–my guess is it’s probably gonna be a lot higher.

The Excel sheet (well, Zoho sheet) is part of my overall strategy: it’s smart enough to expand or shrink the plan, depending on whether I underestimate or overestimate the time it takes to finish an activity. That way, as I update the plan, I always get immediate feedback on how the update is going to affect my schedule.