Update

So at this point I've gone through all of the materials save for derivatives and alternative investments, which I'll approach a bit later given the relatively low priority in the exam and the fact that the material is pretty quick (180 pages of CFAI material).  My approach went something like this.  I first started with the CFAI materials, reading them on my computer and taking notes alongside in the blog posts.  This proved to be a pretty effective method.  After ethics and the first quant section, I switched over to Schweser and used those to study probability, micro/macro, financial reporting and analysis, and corporate finance/portfolio management.  I found that Schweser offered very concise summaries and focused on the formulas and gave good context for how to use things in the exam.

Partly because I was traveling back to the US over the last few weeks, for the Equity and Fixed Income topics I used the physical CFAI book - old school I know.  I made an effort to read slowly and carefully and underline as I went along.  It took probably two weeks but I managed to read the entire book, cover to cover, and do just about every problem set.  The only downside of this is that I don't have all of these sections summarized online now, but I think the tradeoff was fair.  Equity and Fixed Income are a major portion of the exam, and worth learning thoroughly through the primary sources in my opinion.

Some things I learned from equity and fixed income:

• Be very careful to think about the number of periods you are discount - e.g. if a $5,000 perpetuity is delayed so it pays its first payment at t=5, what is its present value assuming a 10% discount rate?  Part 1 is easy - 5,000/0.10 = 50,000.  But then you discount this by 4 years, not 5, to get PV at t=0.  This is because an ordinary annuity pays at the end of the year.  Thus, an annuity that pays its first payment at t=5 is an annuity that starts at t=4.  These little things are the devil in present value problems.
• Fixed income is complicated and even though I worked in debt for 3 years I feel like I need a tutor to explain to me in lay terms the differents between spot, forward, and other rates - the calculations are quite painstaking and it will be interesting to see in practice exams how these concepts actually come about.
• Portfolio management formulae are difficult but not impossible with some repetition.  The fact that the formulae are so long (e.g. for calculating the variance of a portfolio) means that likely at most they would just give you numbers to plug into the primary formula, and not ask you to do manipulations like you would see in present value problems.  I'll likely only memorize the formulas for a two-security portfolio.
• Some of the approaches in fixed income require trial and error - these problems are very time consuming and I'll be disappointed if I see them come up on the exam.  If I do, they will be left for last.

So in the next few days, my focus is going to be on spinning back through the materials one more time, and beginning to construct a cheat sheet to firm up some of the formulas in my head.  Yesterday I reviewed all of ethics and the first few parts of quantitative methods based on my blog entries.  Today I'll be continuing through quantitative methods and writing the formulas.  People seem to agree that making the sheet yourself is the best way to remember all the formulas and keep things straight.