CFA Level II – Week #1 | Ethics, Soft Dollar Standards, and Research Objectivity
Days Remaining until Exam: 265

It’s been an interesting first week to be back studying the Chartered Financial Analyst Institute (CFAI) level II curriculum. It’s been about 3 whole months since I had last cracked open a CFAI book, and I have to say – it feels good to be getting back into the swing of things since this time I’ll have 8 whole months to prep instead of just 18 weeks like I had with Level I. I’m starting early on Level II because the content has been rumored to be more difficult. Additionally, an early head start will make it much easier to learn at a more manageable / less hectic pace while simultaneously balancing the responsibilities of life, working full-time, traveling, and completing my Quantitative & Computational Finance (Financial Engineering) courses this semester.

This week, thanks in-part to the Labor Day holiday on Monday, allowed me to speed through 250 pages of Ethics reading in Volume 1 of the 2012 CFAI curriculum. The first two sections, Code of Ethics and Professional Standards, was a good refresher from Level I without too much cognitive effort to understand and apply. The third section, CFA Institute Soft Dollar Standards, was a bit more difficult to fully comprehend and understand given the verbose and highly technical and detail orientated nature of the subject matter. I can tell that this particular section is going to warrant some additional concentrated study time on my part to fully master. Thanks to my friends at Allen Resources (http://www.allenresources.com) I have the help of some instructional MP3s and plenty of extra practice questions via the QuizBank to help in my mastery of this particular material. The fourth section, CFA Research Objectivity Standards, was along the same lines and format of Section 3, but in my opinion it was a bit easier to understand and comprehend.

In summary, it’s good to be back in the saddle again reading for the June 2012 CFA exam! It’s unquestionably no easy task to start out reading 250 pages in the first week, but the mere 50 pages of next week’s session should make it a breeze in comparison.

Study Plan for this Week: Read Session #2 – Ethical and Professional Standards (Application).

Note: Since Session #2 is just ~50 pages of easy reading, I might try and get it knocked out this evening so that I can spend the rest of my week this week relaxing and catching up on Stochastic Processes for Finance (and the associated differential equations).