Description : This section contains note of CFA level 2 Program
Study Notes for Professional Standards and Ethics for CFA Level 1. Unedited, but still useful.
2014 CFA Level 1 Secret Sauce
CFA mock paper
CFA
Full description
CFA CFA Level 1 – Preparation Strategy
How many hours hou rs are needed to prepare for CFA L1?
CFA CFA institute recommends 250 hours, h ours, however CFA CFA institute inherently assumes that you are a typical CFA candidate, which means that you have a finance background and/or finance work experience. For someone someone with with average average abilit ability y and no finance finance work experi experienc encee and no finance finance background my estimate is 400 hours. Let’s suppose you study 3 days on week days 2 hours each and on 2 weekends you study 5 hours each that makes it 16 hours in a week. That is equal to 64 hours in a week or 384 hours in 6 months duration. Add 16 hours for revision etc. Why I am keeping two days off on week days is because on some days you are tired and don’t want to study and on some days you have some obligations etc. Some days you will study but won’t learn much. This way you can have some social life. So basically you need to study for for 6 months: 2 hours on 3 week days and 5 hours/day on weekends, making 16 hours a week. Failure Strategy
Some one can say that I will study 3 months and put 350 hours. This translates to 30 hours a week which means 2 hour every week day and 20 hour on weekend. The problem with this strategy is that the material of CFA is easy but it needs ce rtain time to get assimilated. You would be reading everything, understanding something and at the end of 2 months remembering almost nothing.
Study material – Scheweser, Stalla, Curriculum Book, Secret Sauce, Video Lecture, Audio Tapes, Tapes, Quick Sheet, Q Bank , Passmaster , CFA CFA Institute Exam Papers
Let’s define these one by one Scheweser is a third party course provider/ study notes provider. As there is water in a desert similarly there is Scheweser for CFA CFA exams. Wikipedia Wikipedia says Conventional wisdom for clearing CFA exams is to study from Scheweser notes. The mool mantra for clearing CFA CFA is “Stick to Scheweser and Pray to God.”
Scheweser provides the following material
1.) Study notes – 5 books for theory and 2 books containing a total of 6 CFA exam papers based on the th e actual CFA L1 exam pattern. 2.) Secret Sauce – A compendium of formula and basic concepts of the entire 5 theory books. Good to have but not a must. 3.) Video Lecture /Audio Tapes – This contains the theory of the CFA books explained in audio/video tapes. Buy it if you have time, money and learn better by listening or watching. I would avoid it as they are already enough books. 4.) Question Bank – A collection of 4000 objective type problems presented in a CD format. You can either take a CD or else you can access the questions online. There is quantity but not quality in these problems. Try to get CD from your friend but don’t buy it. Stalla is another third party course provider/ study notes provider like Scheweser. It provides all the stuff that Scheweser provides but with different name. Passmaster is the Question Bank for Stalla
Curriculum Book – These are the 8 kg of books provided by CFA Institute. Excellent for learning difficult/new material and has very good end of the chapter questions. The only problem is you need more time to read the material, revise the material and unless you make notes you will have difficulty separating the wheat from the chaff. That is material that is important for the test and the material that will will not be asked on exam. Many people pass from reading CFA books however if you plan to do so make notes.
