Totally understand putting off Level 2. It would be very challenging to prepare in such a short time unless you were already a finance whiz, or basically had no other daily responsibilities.

Wishing you lots of luck continuing the path!

-lumi

After reading through your blog on Level 2, I am very excited to continue my CFA journey.

i like to use morningstar.com when i’m looking for more information. for example, enter a stock and then look at the menu on the lefthand side. click on “valuation ratios” or “key ratios”. note that the opinion part of their site is pay-only, but everything else is free.
click for an example

also moneycentral.msn.com has a lot of free information too, just a little complicated to navigate until you get used to it.
click for an example

Are you aware of any sites that provide in depth data for companies? e.g. Price to book etc. I’ve got P/E from yahoo, but would like a little more info to narrow down my choices.

Cheers

Craig

for what it’s worth i found the exam questions to be more straightforward than the problem sets, which could sometimes be a little tricky.

i had 40 days for review between finishing my first pass through all the material (first pass meaning reading each chapter and working each problem once). i had hoped to work all problem sets a 2nd time for review but only made it about halfway through the 78 or so chapters.

Book 5 is coming along a bit slowly – fixed income isn’t my favorite topic, but i hope to be done and write a blog on it soon!

thanks for writing and good luck!

I find a lot of the questions at the back to be fairly simple and straight forward, more definition like than applying a concept. I feel pretty stupid when I answer a question and end up with the wrong answer because of careless reading on my part. Every time I do it I just hope it doesn’t happen on the actual exam.

How many weeks did you have left to review after completing the readings for exam 1?

How is book 5 coming along? I still can’t believe you are on book 5 already. At this pace you should have at least 2-3 months to review.

there were some days / sections (economics, financial statements) where i had trouble answering every single question at the end. this was usually due to having read a chapter i had no interest in and/or having read it when very tired.

for the most part, my focus was on keeping moving with the assumption that even if i did score poorly on the practice questions, i’d get to review the section again later.

and i must say that repetition is the key b/c i thought many questions to be easy right after having read the chapter, but hard when I came back to re-work them months later and had forgotten key parts of the material.

When you went through the material the first time what were your scores on the questions at the end of the chapter? Example low, average, high. Did you feel comfortable with your level of knowledge after completing the reading and the respective questions?