GMATClub's Unofficial Chartered Financial Analyst thread

Hey guys!

I just took the Level I exam yesterday, and to report... morning session I felt really good on, but afternoon session was significantly harder. Quant was tough, while FSA was surprisingly easy - the other sections were about par for the course. Some of the ethics questions were really tricky though.

I wrote it in Vancouver in a converted hockey rink at UBC, and maybe 90% of the exam writers were asian. :D

My background contains no business or statistics courses (I'm an English major), so the curriculum was quite difficult. Thankfully I had taken introductory economics courses before (and did really well in them) so I barely needed to review the Economics section. The Asset Valuation and Ethics sections were also quite intuitive, and I spent far less time on these than on FSA - which took up maybe half of my total studying time. Another major hurdle for me was the Stats and Probability, but those were a fairly minor portion of the exam so I just made sure I knew the basic concepts - variance, the central limit theorem, skewness/kurtosis, etc. while going through the entire material once. I will probably need to take an introductory statistics course before tackling the Portfolio Management material at Level II.

My studying involved studying every day from around the first week of October till now - I did not have a job, and dropped all my classes to focus on this. I read the curriculum for Ethics and part of FSA, but for the rest I used the Schweser's notes. Those were a lot clearer, and I really liked how the LOS were explained in order and in separate sections. The actual curriculum books were often confusing with respect to this.

After about 4 weeks of intense studying, I took the Boston Society Mock Exam on Nov. 8th and scored 156/240 (65%). My weakest area was FSA - and at the time I had not even looked at Corporate Finance or Portfolio Management yet. After the Mock Exam, I finished up the curriculum, and spent the last 3 weeks on Schweser Pro, reviewing the LOS and doing the LOS quizzes one by one. I spent an additional 10 days on FSA to shore it up since I had zero accounting background and it was all very confusing and arbitrary to me.

I rewrote the morning session of the Mock Exam on Thursday morning and scored 97/120 (80.8%), and spent the last day and a half reviewing Derivatives and Ethics. Then I went to write the real thing.

This thread has helped me and actually was also one of the reasons I even decided to enter the CFA program in the first place. So here's me giving back with an account of my experience in it so far - I hope it is of help to those who are also hoping to pass!