This is an unpopular opinion, and in no way should be construed as a recommendation, but I passed all three levels without taking a single mock exam.

The problem I have with mocks is a candidate is essentially playing 'Battleship' with the entire curriculum.

• Level 1 curriculum: Thousands of potential concepts, 180 pegs.
• Level 2 curriculum: Thousands of potential concepts, 88 pegs.
• Level 3 curriculum: Thousands of potential concepts, no clear determination if you even won the game

To overcome the above, people end up taking multiple mocks. That's fine and I suppose that's what I would do in that scenario also, but in that case why fixate on the differential of scores across mock exams? Your score went up, maybe you are smarter, or maybe the second mock you took was easier or maybe you got lucky with the peg placement of that singular game of battleship. Your score went down, maybe you've forgotten some things, or maybe this mock was harder. I've noticed people are cognizant about the relative difficulty of mocks across different providers, but they aren't as confident that such a thing exists across mocks from the same provider. Why wouldn't it?

For my time, I'd rather carpet bomb the curriculum vs. a series of surgical strikes in the dark. EOCQs + Blue Box + Qbank hit all the concepts more comprehensively than a mock exam could. It's important to note for L2 and L3 I spent NINE months preparing for each. That definitely was a factor for me.

Mocks do have tremendous value from a metadata standpoint. They give you a much better feel for what questions will look like on an actual exam, they help with time management, they help with effectively picking out relevant info from vignettes, they help with structured responses, they randomize concepts, forcing you to mentally pivot from one question to the next. However, I maintain if you don't NEED that sort of help, then mocks should just be considered an extension of a Qbank. Don't dwell quite so much on the scores.

That last point is easy to say, but very hard to do. In fact, the main reason I avoided mocks is the potentially devastating impact taking one could have had on my confidence going into the real thing. I have seen it so. many. times. in this sub. Confidence shattered two days before the exam: good luck on the real thing! I know myself and I know I couldn't (completely) shake off something like that. If you can then you are much stronger than I.

I went into L2 and L3 confident to the point of delusion.

Anyway that's my take. I'm not advocating people skip mock exams, but if some people are considering it, I'm just trying to make you feel more comfortable about that as a potential choice. Good luck everyone.

Hi everyone,
I’m 28 years old and I’m seriously considering a career as a Financial Analyst.
My current plan is to learn Excel, SQL, and Power BI, and also get a degree in finance to build a strong foundation.
I’d love to hear from people already working in the field.
What are the biggest downsides or challenges that people don’t usually talk about?
How is the salary progression? Is the compensation worth the effort?
What skills have been the most valuable in your career?
If you could start over, would you still choose this career?
Is there anything you wish you had known before getting into finance?
Any advice, resources, or personal experiences would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance!

I know I know, I should have done some mocks by now, but I only started studying in May when I was sure I would have 2-4 hours of childfree time each day. Doing the PM pathway, and I have relevant work experience to help me with 60% of the material.

I really need to pass this exam on the first go so that 1) I never have to do it again, and 2) avoid feeling guilty for spending time with LES and MM instead of my only child.

On the plus side, I am on mat leave so I do have the mental capacity (don't have to think about work/deal with work stress), on the MAJOR down side I am sleep deprived and my brain has physically shrunken (its a real thing for moms, look it up).

So now that I have three weeks left and wrapping up the last reading of PM, I'm definitely freaking the f out.

Any recommended strategies? Should I tackle more CFAI questions now (done about 30%) or save that for working on my weak topics?

I should dive straight into mocks, right?

Sincerely,

Sleepy and synaptically challenged

Feeling burnout, last 20 days left. Have to search for a job after exam. Stress is killing me. Mock scores 60s. What should I do?

Hello everyone

I'm a final-year engineering student (stats + quant finance in a top university in France for these fields). I've spent the last ~5 months building a personal project to try and enter in the commodity sector (bank desks, hedge funds, reinsurance companies), and I'd honestly love some outside eyes on it, especially from people who actually work in the space. I already have some experience in the banking sector (internship in a CIB as a quant researcher)

My project was decomposed in 2 parts and is about modelling temperature for different financial use cases, whether for trading in banks or in hedge funds.

Part 1: weather derivatives
I started by digging into weather derivatives as a field and reading around it a fair bit. What struck me is how fast the whole climate/weather space is moving with AI right now: the physical climate models are insanely compute-heavy, and even then, forecasts past about a week are essentially random. I went for weather derivatives for two reasons: the sector genuinely interests me and weather has a massive impact on the world economy, and honestly the data is pretty easy to get and way less painful to work with than financial data. From there, I modeled temperature with a few different models (some classical statistical ones, some ML) to predict a climate index. Each model gives its own predictions, so what I'm really after is the distribution of that index under each model. As a complement to the analysis, I also deployed a small app where you can pick a city and a contract and see each model's predicted index distribution and the price it implies (available here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/nayelsdk1/boreas-weather-derivatives ).

Part 2: temperature and gas volatility
I wanted to see whether winter cold anomalies actually couple with Henry Hub natural-gas volatility. To dig into it I tested a Kalman filter and a few GARCH models.

You can find all the reports + notebooks in my app

For me, the goals for this project were to understand the classic models used in commodities and implement it and end up with something end-to-end I can show recruiters to stand out a bit.

So I am posting here to have some advices about :

- Honestly anything, the modeling or the way it's presented. If you're in the field, what would you keep and what would you toss? Is my project relevant regarding the current context ? Are companies looking for that kind of work ? I also have other experience in the sector (target school, relevant internships, ...) but I have never worked professionally in this field, that's why I am posting today

- It's very far from perfect. I made a bunch of choices where other paths might've been smarter (or not) so don't hold back on telling me where I went wrong

You can also send me a message in private if needed ! Thank you a lot !!!

exactly one month to go for my cfa L1 exam and only completed FI quants ethics ai pm equity deriv
eco fsa ci is left
am i fucked up???
any tipsss????

Any professional HFT out there have any insight on how PCAP data for CME futures compares between LSEG/Refinitiv/TRTH and DataBento? Trying to decide between the two providers for the last 2 years of historical L3/MBO for a new market making project. Mostly interested to know about the quality of the data and quality of timestamps at the data recording server.

We built Jaxfolio (https://github.com/bravant-oss/jaxfolio), a hardware-accelerated portfolio optimization library built natively on JAX.

Docs: https://bravant-oss.github.io/jaxfolio/

Github: https://github.com/bravant-oss/jaxfolio

Standard Python tools like SciPy or PyPortfolioOpt bottleneck during large-scale backtests or heavy Monte Carlo simulations due to Python overhead and CPU constraints. Jaxfolio fixes this by compiling optimization math directly to XLA for GPU/TPU execution.

More importantly, using JAX's vmap, you can vectorize the optimizer to compute thousands of rolling efficient frontiers simultaneously in a single batched operation without looping. Because the code is fully differentiable, you can also embed these optimizers directly into deep learning training loops.

The library currently supports Mean-Variance, Risk Parity, and Black-Litterman models, and is significantly faster than traditional CPU-bound solvers. I’d love for the community to try it out, critique the API, or test it against your own edge-case datasets. Accepting contributions.

3 weeks to go and I’m literally struggling with derivatives. The best mark I’m getting right now is 50%… and that’s just on pure luck! I’m quite confident on the rest of the topics though. I just don’t know if I should defer or keep going

I just got it today and it is very helpful so far to identify weak spots. Maybe I’m overdoing it, but I’m making a comprehensive set of flashcards basically copying word-for-word.

Do you think this is a good use of time/energy? How else are others utilizing such a comprehensive tool?

For Justify questions do we need to justify why the other answers are incorrect?

Additionally for determine do we need to explain why the answer is correct.

CFAI Qbank responses are confusing with regard to some of these command words.

Appreciate the advice!

I'm an analyst at a private wealth firm, so I'm taking the Private Wealth specialized pathway. The two main things I'm trying to pick a provider on are:

1. Essay/constructed response: which provider actually teaches the writing technique and time management, not just the content?
2. Private Wealth pathway: has anyone used a specific provider's Private Wealth materials and found them genuinely thorough? Does it really matter which provider you pick for your path? Since the pathways are still new, it's hard to tell which one would be the best fit for this.

For context, I've used the CFAI materials (base + extra), Chalk and Board, UWorld, and Salt Solutions mocks, plus Kaplan back at L1 (the only one I didn't love, though essays and pathways weren't a factor then). Mark Meldrum keeps coming up for the essay side, so I'm leaning that way, but I'd love to hear from anyone who's sat L3 or is prepping now.

Broo the fsa is frying my brain like wtf are those long ass vignettes 😭😭
Somebody else also facing the same ?
Current accuracy with 2.5 readings complete 63%

I might have gotten it wrong on the actual exam if I hadn’t seen this type of question today.

I built a C++ library for linux kernel bypass networking such as Solarflare ef_vi, DPDK, Verbs(mlx5) and also AF_XDP. Solarflare ef_vi and DPDK are two of most commonly used kernel bypass techniques in HFT market making firms.

Using this library I measured the RTT latency using a loopback on Solarflare X2522-Plus(ef_vi + DPDK), ConnectX-4 Lx(DPDK + Verbs + AF_XDP) and Intel XXV710-DA2(DPDK + AF_XDP). The benchmarks were run for 24 hours with median all the way upto P99.999 and max.

Solarflare X2522-Plus produced a RTT median of 1.866us and a max of 3.307us with 45B frames over 24 hours. This was the best result. Comprehensive results are all documented in the repository.

Over this project I did come across numerous driver(and NIC) specific quirks and bugs. These are all documented too.

Solarflare X2522-Plus is quite fast due to a Tx trick known as cut-through programmed IO(CTPIO). But I found this to be fragile, it has three modes: fast, default and in-order. Fast mode produces the lowest median but has a measurable percentage of failed CTPIO known as CTPIO “fallbacks” or “poison”. The CPTIO fallbacks significantly hurt the tail latency(P99 - P99.999). The CPTIO poison frames can be measured via ethtool. I used the in-order CTPIO mode which gives marginally higher medium but a tight tail latency.

Another strange issue I found was the PTP subsystem in the Solarflare X2522-Plus. So the default sfc driver runs a in-kernel IEEE 1588 subsystem with a PTP hardware clock, a dedicated PTP channel and management controller firmware activity. I found this to be a problem as a noticeable number of interrupts were mounting in /proc/interrupts and the stock driver with ef_vi produced a max of 7.679us which seemed very high. Then I ran the same benchmark with DPDK which produced a max of 5.628us. DPDK unbinds the driver so the PTP subsystem does not work. Then I compiled out the PTP subsystem from the sfc driver and ran the 24 hour benchmark again and the max was reduced to only 3.307us.

There is a lot of more interesting stuff but I think the post is already getting long so I won’t mention any more. Everything is documented in the repository. It is also 100% open source with an Apache-2.0 license.

Hey, like the title has mentioned, I have underestimated FSA and took me longer than expected still have 2 more modules to go and left with 6 subjects to complete, Equity, FI, PM, Derivatives, Economics and Ethics, I am panicking already as i only have 3 months of study to be able to do revision and mocks for 1.5 months as planned, exam is on 14th of November, am i cooked? And do you think it’s manageable to study all of those topics in 3 months?

I'm not currently able to access the LES. Anyone else having this issue? Really tough with 3 weeks to go before level 3

I have uploaded 3 pictures.
1 contains text from the official CFA book curriculum for ethics(pg#20)
2 is a end of chap MCQ present in the book(pg#30)
3 is its correct answer with explanation also present in the book(pg#32)

Is it just me or do you also think nowhere does the text instruct to prioritize raising it within the firm rather outside it with the words "possibly outside the firm". While reading the text I also wondered what implications this could have for confidentiality but I thought maybe we can share a scenario after anonymizing it. But then this MCQ has made me even more confused.

Aug 2026 candidate. Given paucity of time and less than satisfactory level of preparation till date due to laziness, I am looking at mocks as a source of practice question bank and also for mock exam practice under timed exam like conditions. What i have are as under

1. The 2 full length CFAI provided mock exams

2. The 5 Full length Mark Meldrum Mocks

3. Bill s Mocks which I may or may not buy given the unfavourable USD INR exchange rate

4. How the the CFAI practice pack mock exams? vs Bill Mocks

   I have completed the first pass of the curriculum except Currency, Ethics and Performance Measurement. will get 7 days leave.

Suggestions please on how best to use exams available for both practice and mock exam practice.

Thanks

How many topics have you finished??

I'm shitting my pants right now. I have literally started out the 5th topic now! Planning to finish the 5th topic by this month that is portfolio management. DYING ALDREADY.

I’m curious how everyone manages their CFA study schedule and tracks whether they’re actually making enough progress.

Do you track study hours, completed readings, practice questions, mock scores, or something else? Do you use a spreadsheet, calendar, app, or just follow your prep provider’s plan?

Also, what do you do when you miss a planned study session? Do you move it to another day, increase the workload later, skip it, or rebuild the rest of your schedule?

Would love to hear what has worked for you, especially during busy work weeks

By Closing the duration Gap:

BPVA > BPVL:

Enter a pay-fixed swap

▪ Best if rates will be high

Collar, buy a higher SFR payer and sell a lower SFR receiver swaption

▪ Decreasing rates make the collar more attractive

Buy the higher SFR payer swaption

▪ Best if rates fall below a threshold

Would someone explain above statement? really do not get it. thanks. :D

Don’t understand why option C is correct and not option B. The support for option C is that the plan is under funded and basic two portfolio approach assumes the pension plan has surplus.

How this right, Basic portfolio can handle any funded ratio, we can a partial hedge and return seeking.

Please help.

How do you estimate the capacity of an options based strategy, especially without level 2 data?