Check in

Last night concluded the materials review for the Ethics and Quantitative Methods portion.  I used the CFAI material for all of ethics, skipping for now the section on Global Investment Performance Standards (which I'll check with Schweser to fill in) and also used CFAI for the intro section to discounted cash flow and applications of DCF.

Following either Schweser or CFAI, that concludes book 1 of 5 of the CFAI materials.  So far according to my notes I've spent a cumulative 39.0 hours studying in the last 10 days, and at that pace I should hit about 330 hours by the test date.  Based on those figures I'm about 12% complete with studying at this point, which feels like a decent pace - each of the following 4 books are a good bit shorter than book 1 (esp. book 2, Economics), so I allot about 10% (roughly - these might be a good bit more technical) to each book, and I should be around 50% total time elapsed when I am finished reviewing curriculum material, and from then on, it's practice questions and deeper drilling using CFAI materials.

My target each day has been to do about 4.5 hours, to build in some cushion for lazy days.  I think by aiming for 4.5 I should be able to keep my average around 3.75 which would be 318 by test day.

The CFAI materials began to get a bit frustrating and slow in Probability - the notation and examples, while smart, were very difficult and dense to follow.  Therefore I used Schweser to complete the rest of the sections in probability, statistics, hypothesis testing and technical analysis.

Schweser is pretty minimalistic and from what I hear on the blogosphere/fora it is not enough to pass the tests - so my plan is to use Schweser to get a solid initial base of the concepts, and then drill in using the CFAI materials for high priority sections and those I have trouble with.  CFAI probabilities seems to be one of those - I have a hard time translating what they are doing into the formulas and applying the probability rules - so I think that will be a section where I need to spend a good amount of time and care.

On to economics in a bit.