I PASSED CFA LEVEL 1!!!

I PASSEDD!!!

June 2008 Pass Rate : 35%

Congrats to all passers!

Seeya all in Level 2!

Finally completed book1! Phew!

Woah. After 4 weeks, I finally finished book1, which consists of study session 1,2,3.

2 problems I faced.

1) Procrastination. I had been caught up with some other stuff, that I neglected studying CFA consistently.. Bad. Need to be more consistent in the coming weeks.

2) Some of the study sessions, I have learnt before in university. However, I don't know what I did not learn before, thus I had to manually flip each page. It is likely I will attempt to go through the curriculum faster without reading every single page. One reason is because I managed to cover the end of topic questions fairly easily. Will see how that goes.

Moving on to book2, economics!

Stuck on procrastination.

Ugh. The problem of not getting the study notes.
The truth is, I have studied probabilities, and statistics before. And when you have a CFA study text that is 400 pages thick, that is aimed to cover a broadbase of topics, it can get very very boring very very fast.

90 days left, and I am still stuck on study session 3 (out of 18 in total.) Hopefully, I'll get pass study session 3, as well as 4,5,6(which are on economics) fast.

This-Is-Not-Good.

How to register for CFA Level 1 exams?

How to register for the CFA Level 1 exams??

Short answer? Go to http://www.cfainstitute.org/cfaprog/register/index.html

There are a few things you might want to take note though. Firstly, you got to be in your final year of university, or have already gotten a degree. Next, the registration fees for the CFA exam actually varies as time passes.

For example, if you wanted to register for the June 2008 CFA Level 1 exam, registering before 3rd Oct 2007 would have gotten you the cheapest fees of US$600. Registering before 15th Feb 2008 would have gotten you US$688. And the final deadline is on the 17th Mar 2008, which would result in a big jump to US$930.

However, thats not all! Being a first time enroller into the CFA program, theres an application fee involved. US$390 for the first 2 dates, and US$465 for the final date.

3 Oct 2007:
$390 + $600 = $990

15 Feb 2008:
$390 + $688 = $1078

17 Mar 2008:
$465 + $930 = $1395

I registered just before the 15th of Feb deadline. So I paid a total of US$1078, which is inclusive of the 8.1kg worth of curriculum books.

I don't remember reading about any extra waiver, so I would think if someone does fail the exam, they would only need to pay the exam fees, which is US$600.

Completed CFA Study Session 2, Quantitative Methods

Wow. That took a long time.

I planned to finish it on 22nd Feb and then finish up study session 3 mid this week. But looks like I got delayed by 5 days.

It was horrible.

The problem was that there was tons of words. And most seemingly unimportant. Thats the problem when you have taken statistics before in university, and you don't have study notes.

I didn't want to skip any of the pages, because I never know what is important or things that I didn't learn. For example, I have never learnt semi variance or target semi variance before. Same goes for kurtosis and chebyshev.

In any case, its over now. I noticed a lot of study guides tend to recommend skipping book 3 and keeping it last. ie, you will study book 1,2,4,5,6,3

Most likely I will follow that method. Another way I've heard is doing it in reverse order (6,5,4,3,2,1). Reason being the final books are the thinnest ones.

How would you do it?