hi guys welcome back to my channel my name is Maria i work in portfolio management at one of the largest european asset managers on this channel I help students and young professionals to get front of his roles in banking and asset management and today i would like to share with you some marketing essay writing online tips and tricks on how you can best prepare for your upcoming CFA exam as you all know CFA exams are quite tough and pacing rates can sometimes be extremely low.

For example when i was pacing my CFA level 1 exam in may 2021 pacing rate was slightly above 20 which is crazy and i still can't believe that i made it and for CFA level 2 exam which i passed in february 2022 the passing rate was slightly higher but still CFA exams are tough i already filmed a video where i outlined my preparation strategy and resources which i used when i was preparing for my CFA exams however i got very good feedback on that video so i decided to expand on this topic and share with you 10 tips and tricks which can improve your preparation a small disclaimer this video is intended for someone who has little experience with CFA so if you're already on level three probably you won't benefit that much from me talking but if you are someone who is new to CFA i hope this video will save you time and money and my first tip would be to start early start your preparation as soon as you register for your next year for exam and by starting early is important well the earlier you register or the earlier you start your preparation the more time you have in order to cover all materials all textbooks and solve as many exercises as you can let's say you have six months left till your next CFA exam then you can use the first five months in order to really read all materials do all exercises and then one month before the exam you will have this time in order to go back review your notes review summaries solve some more difficult exercises and you can also use this time in order to solve mock exams and really time yourself in order to be more efficient during the exam also starting early really helps you to reduce this pre-exam anxiety because you won't have those recurring thoughts that you will not be able to cover the whole material on time just because you will know that you have sufficient time left and in case emergency happens you will have one month of a buffer time in order to cover everything.

My second tip would be do not try to memorize every single details that you read in your books why it wouldn't work well because CFA materials official CFA materials it's more than i think a few thousands of pages and it's a lot other preparation providers probably also include materials which are more than one thousand pages long and if you're going to try to memorize every small detail every concept every sentence you you're probably going to spend more than one month on a book and it's really it's a no-go it's simply impossible and unnecessary to reproduce every single detail of what you read on the exam instead try to focus on topic weights so every topic on CFA exam has a specific weight and you should align your preparation with that topic weight focus on key learning outcomes and don't get lost my third tip would be to opt for external preparation providers external preparation providers is basically anything apart from official CFA materials so for instance kaplan schweser valley anything and i think it's really important because as i said before CFA materials it's really overwhelming it's thousands of pages and if i would only use the official CFA material probably i will not finish my preparation even in one year and even more importantly the questions which you are going to experience during CFA level 1 exam and level 2 exam it's all multiple choice questions it's not a secret for official CFA q bank they have a lot of questions where you actually need to write down a number word or anything like that it's it will not help you to build this skill of solving fast multiple choice questions which you would need during the actual exam official CFA questions might be good for you if you already finished your main q bank my main preparation strategy and you just want some extra practice then you can come back and solve some of those questions my tip number four is to keep your preparation consistent one hour of study every day is a lot better than one long weekend study session why is it better well you retain more knowledge if you absorb it in smaller bites regularly let's be honest if you study for five hours how does your productivity during the first hour compares to your productivity during your fifth hour i'm sure that during the first one two hours you are a lot more efficient you retain more knowledge you have extra focus you you just retain more knowledge so unless you have a crazy investment banking job where you work for 16 hours per day try to introduce CFA for one hour in your day-to-day life maybe it's one hour when you go to work maybe it's one hour during your lunch time maybe it's one hour before you go to sleep anything but it's really really important to do it regularly commit to one hour per day and naturally as the exam gets closer you will start spending more and more time preparing my tip number five would be to arrange a preparation based on topic rates so every topic on CFA exam has a specific weight it's not a secret you know this information upfront and it is not fixed so let's say one topic can be from five percent to ten percent or from ten percent to fifteen percent also topic weights for CFA level one exam and cpa level two exam are slightly different so i will not tell you exactly which which topics you should focus your attention on however you should know basics for all topics but do spend more time on topics which have higher rate it's crucial because you naturally would feel like spending more time on topics where you don't perform really well for me for instance it was like derivatives fixed income because it's not something i interact on a day-to-day basis i really looked at topic weights and i asked myself is it really that crucial if i spend 10 more hours on that topic so especially during your last two weeks of preparation mind your time and try to cover all material not just topics which you do not know my tip number six would be that two weeks before the exam you really start focusing on refreshing all key concepts from all topics and the best way to do that is using such materials as quick sheet secret sauce and anything which is essentially a summary of the material you've read before actually when i was preparing for CFA level 2 exam i was writing down in my secret sauce all formulas or definitions or any important concepts which i found important but which were not listed in a secret sauce itself and then two weeks before the exam it really made my review period a lot more efficient because i just had my secret sauce in front of me and i didn't need to go to you know main materials large textbooks to read again about certain concepts my tip number seven would be to spend equal time on both theory and calculation questions on the actual exam you don't know how many calculation questions exactly you will get and which topics will be tested more excessively in terms of calculations however when you're solving questions from a cube bank normally you should get a feeling which formulas which concepts are tested more excessively and then really aim at memorizing those formulas those problem-solving procedures first my tip number eight is mind your time management start practicing your time management skills in advance for instance time yourself when you're doing a q bank and then write down how much time you spend solving that many questions please remember that the more questions you solve per day the faster you build your speed i think it's especially important for theory questions because you don't even need to use pen and a piece of paper you just need to retrieve certain pieces of information from your head and the more you do it the easier it will be during the exam my tip number nine is to sit down and learn all formulas two weeks before the exam this should leave you enough time in order to work on all those formulas once again and it's not like you're going to see them for the first time probably you already practiced them when you were working on a specific topic probably you already know some of those forums by heart but here it's really about making it sharp in your memory so you can easily use them during the exam in those two weeks before the exam really make sure that there is nothing else between you your test and a piece of paper avoid using any other materials because in that way you would really understand if all formulas all key concepts sharpen your memory and you can easily use them during the exam and my final tip please remember that it's not about getting every single question right i haven't found a single person who made 100 score in CFA exam i don't even think they share such information if you scored 100 on a specific topic but you don't need to solve every question correctly in order to pass this exam and i'm not sure to what extent it's true but you can even fail maybe one or two topics and still pass again i don't know to what extent it's true but i do think it happened to me on level two because one topic i performed really poorly i remember when i opened this question i was like i don't really understand what you want from me i'm sorry i can solve it so that was fun well that was not fun but i still passed it even though i scored very poorly on one specific topic and i do think that the cornerstone of your preparation is really optimizing for knowing basics about everything rather than knowing everything.