Path to the CFA (Part 4)

The result of CFA Level I was posted online during the Chinese New Year 2009. In order not to spoil my holiday mood, I only checked the result few days after the Chinese New Year festival, and that was at the beginning of February 2009.

When I knew I passed the Level I, I had to make a very critical decision to continue sit for the Level II in the coming June 2009 and I only had another 4 more months to study. In addition, I learnt from the past experience that self-study is not easy and also my other friends who have taken the Level II before told me that Level II is the toughest level, so I was considering to take extra tuition at the Kasturi college in KL which will commence in 7 February 2009. Furthermore, the tuition fees was RM4k which was a lot to me since I did not work at that time.At the end, I decided to take the tuition class and thus I had to shift from Ipoh back to KL.

The tuition classes were normally hold on weekend and started from 9am to 5pm. Sometimes certain tutors were not available during weekend, they would reschedule the tuition class on one of the weekdays and the class would start from 6pm to 9pm.

Since I was studying full time, so I had time to attend msot of the tuition classes. However I would skip certain classes due to the reason that I did not like certain tutors as they always talked something not relevant to the CFA program.

So far I could tell there were 2 good tutors from the college, i.e. David Meow and Wong Kah Teck. Both of them have vast working experience and they are exprienced professional with relevant professional qualifications. They were giving tutor classes for topics such as Ethics, Equities, Corporate Finance, Bond, Economics, Portfolio Management, Derivatives, Alternative Investments and Quantitatives. According to what I know, Wong Kah Teck has open his own consultant firm and he is no longer the tutor of the college, and David is still teaching in the college.

This round I changed my studying strategy. I was more interactive in the study. I read the relevant topics before I went to the class and seek clarifications from the tutors during the class. In addition, I also knew some students who are investment banker, equity analyst, risk management analyst, corporate finance advisor, corporate lawyer, auditor and etc. Later when we knew each other more in the class, we form our study group and we would hold group discussions once to twice a month, and think this type of study group assisted in many ways of learning the CFA program.