CFA Level 2 - pains and learnings

It happened again. I cleared CFA Level 2. Moment of joy!!! Here are bits of the mind holing process and few of leanings.

Well, level 2 was more difficult than I had initially thought it to be. There were reasons to that - higher course volume, more abstruse topics (I never understood how emerging markets' valuations are done) and likes .There were moments when I though why at the first place did I register for this. But, then beauty of all of it was I learned a lot during the process.

Compared to level 1 there were topics which went on and on and on. These never ending topics seemed to be the biggest challenge. At the first sight you may say that number of pages for level 2 notes has increased by 70% therefore, the I need 70% more time. But, that unfortunately is not true - because there are so many topics which just don't sink in well and you keep on reading over and over again to figure out what the author is saying; only resulting in a decreased confidence and little increased knowledge.

Few things which I learned out of the whole prep story were - better time management helps; focus on what is just expected to be known and don't waste time on things which not important outside of the study hours. There are two faces to time management. One is higher level another one is micro level. At a higher level I was bang on target; gave a fortnight for each book and moved on. But what happened within those 15 day brackets was interesting - I used to roam around for the first week and then as the end of fornight approached I used to start working harder. So, this led to a lot of inconsistency in preparation and therefore, a feeling within that I m just not there. Secondly, reading CFAI books is great but then somewhere it doesn't help you for the recall part in the exam. Hence, all time that went into the CFAI books was not useful. Thirdly, I was wasting a lot of time during weekends which proved to confidence shattering. After wasting a full weekend I just used to go home and think was wasting the whole weekend essential.

So, here I am - with few learnings and a positive result. Life waits for an MBA now.