Hello guys, hope everyone is having a productive Thursday
night and is all pumped for a full weekend study schedule on Saturday and
Sunday. I understand many of your guys found my post on studying on weekends
quite depressing, sadly true, but if you have a full time job, this is the best
opportunity to get through some LOS’s. I know sleeping in would be so nice
after a long week at work, just remind yourself there’s 80 more days before
exam day, hurry up to maximize your marginal utility in the CFA studies and place your indifference curve tangent to your CFA demand curve, trade off your play time for more study hours :) If you can use my weekend story for
motivation, don’t hesitate to do so, just know some people somewhere are
studying harder than you.
Assuming an average person takes 5 to 6 months to study for
each of the 3 exams, most candidates should have put in about 8 to 10 weeks of
work so far. Ideally you have created your own study summary while you go
through each LOS in the past few weeks, question remains: did you take the best
notes that will put you above the pass rate? If not, with the 2.5 months left,
how can you improve?
I can never overstate
the importance of the very first point I made on this blog about the LOS
command words. Whether you are using the CFAI curriculum or any other
providers, always go back to the base and understand what you are expected to
do. Same goes for your note taking. Candidates need to not only take notes on definition and formulas,
but also pay special attention on underlying relationships between concepts
that occur in different chapters and how each topic is inter-related to other
chapters.
For example in l3, you understand personal profiling using
key factors such as time, tax, liquidity, legal, unique circumstance. From l1
and l2, you also understand the risk characteristics of bonds and equities
securities. The exam, however, will not test these concepts alone. You will
need to demonstrate you understand the client financial needs by applying the
tools, and recommend an appropriate asset mix based on the risks of different
securities classes.
So writing down the knowledge points will help you, but only
to a certain extent, in helping you memorize what they mean, you must understand and be able to apply
the underlying relationships that support these concepts in a question set.
While you are doing that, leave some space on the sides or
between lines, so later on in your review you can add more notes, you can even
use your favourite colour pens! I
realized I didn’t truly understand many knowledge points reading for the first
time. It was until I did questions and
reviewed these questions, I started to register these concepts, so what I did
was I kept adding supplementary notes in red next to the corresponding LOS on
my notes.
So by
the end of my 5 month studies, I had not only created my study notes, I created
a fantastic notebook of CFA proven knowledge network that’s interrelated with
one and other. This approach helped me reference back to the LOS/knowledge
points every time I encounter new questions of the same topic. It made studying
so much easier for me to go back and forth to reference between chapters that
are tested in the same question set.
One
last note before I leave you to your studies tonight, use a colour pen and be
creative!
Have
a great Thursday evening.
