Exam Introduction ... and my first day of cramming...

Yesterday, I started my preparation for CFA Level-I. I have registered for Level I about 3 months ago, but only skimmed thru a few books so far. The sooner you register the cheaper the exam fee is. You have to become very comfortable with CFA Institute’s website. I have bought several referral books, which I will list as I read them. CFA Institute’s bookstore sells it’s own curriculum material as well as several other reference books from other publishers. The Institute also publishes a study session outline document that clearly specifies the Learning Outcome Statements (LOS) for each subject. You can see the subject area focus for Level-I in the pie chart at the end of this article. The first book in the CFA Curriculum – “Ethical and Professional Standards” is available for free download from their website. This subject constitutes about 15% of the exam … which makes it very important. I have skimmed this book before and have already memorized all the Code of Ethics and Standards of Professional Conduct. I have spent about 4 hours yesterday going through the guidelines and examples of a couple of the standards. I have five more standards to finish reading and then there is a new LOS on Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS). My experience so far is that the material for Ethical and Professional Standards is huge and we need to quickly understand and memorize some of the key statements. One doesn’t need a business or finance background to assimilate the material but in the examples you will hear a lot of roles/terms in the investment management (IM) and investment banking (IB) sector and has actually helped me understand the differences between buy-side vs sell-side etc. I really liked the Ethics and Standards and wondered why all industries don’t have such standards. Most of the time even the most ethical people go by their instincts and sometimes they may be wrong, instead if there were such standards say in technology industry, construction industry, not to mention the airline/credit card/cellular customer service ….they would know exactly what to do. Ofcourse it is still your responsibility to be ethical and practice the standards.