Path to the CFA (Part 5)

I passed CFA Level II in August 2009. Right after that, I spent 3-month time on travelling in overseas to Singapore, Bangkok and China. I came back to KL in November when the class for CFA Level III commenced. This time the number of classmates reduced by another half of the size (about 16 classmates) from the class of Level II as the passing rate for CFA Level II was less than 50%.

As usual, since I was a full time student, I read the curriculum materials 8 hours per day before going for classes. Normally I would reach the class 30 minutes to 1 hour earlier, so I could meet my study group for discussions. The study group was formed by 4 classmates including me. We shared our study experience and raised certain topics that we found difficult to comprehend for group discussion. When it was 1 month before the exam at June 2010, despite the class was over, I still met my study group once a week for group studied at 1 of the unoccupied classroom in Kasturi college. Finally, our effort paid off as all members of my studied group passed the Level III exam! Whereby the passing rate for the whole class in Kasturi college as well as the whole world was only 50%.

In my opinion, the standard of Level III was not as tough as Level II, probably because there were more theory topics than computing topics in Level III. In addition, I found few topics in Level III such as behavioural finance, financial planning and methods of computing investment return (Global Investment Performance Standards) were very to read and understand. Indeed, I further read more books and journals related to those topics that I aforementioned and these have improved my investment assessment skill greatly.

The time to look to for job after completing the full-time study of CFA was so right on track that the world economy was recovering from the finacial crisis since 2008. I took a month of break and travelled to New Zealnd for few weeks after I got the result of Level III and only back in mid-September 2010 for interviews in few Investment Banks which were referred by my friends from the study group. With the reference from my friends, I had gone through few smooth interviews and had few offers on my hand. At the end, I decided to take the offer from a smaller bank, as I hope that a small size bank would not have much stress working environment than the bank. I commenced to work again on in October 2010, and I would still need to accumulate another 2 more years to qualify for the application of the CFA Charter title.