Motivation for the CFA

It's that time of the year again. The curriculum arrived months ago, and after getting through Ethics and Quantitative Methods it was promptly forgotten, but now Financial Reporting and Analysis needs to be cracked and I need to re-find my CFA motivation.

The Big Picture
First I remind myself why I am taking this certification. Matched with my MSc Finance these three letters should allow me to side step the MBA in the future. After transitioning from candidate to member, career doors should swing open, and salaries should double. I should be able to consider myself an expert in my trade, and wield financial analysis like lawyers or doctors wield subpoenas and scalpels.

Big picture thinking only gets you so far, especially when it's so intangible. If passing my level II exam were to give me a 1997 Porsche 993 GT2, then hey, print the poster and I'm motivated! But when it's going to further career goals I'm already hacking away at with academic credentials it gets a little harder. Add on top the fact that I have 4 years to pass the last two exams because I still need the work experience, and working the 7-12 shift after schoolwork is not appealing.

But it's still important. Most people in this industry are perfectionist, workaholic, status freaks, and failure is no option. While I like to think this only partially describes the finance side of me, lately this side has bullied all the other me's into submission - so let's feed the beast. Let's pass the hardest of the 3 tests in a year where school stretches through June, and getting the grade is already stealing time away from the dinner time internet break. If nothing else, the challenge itself should motivate!

Tools for the Weary
One of the fun things about Finance is the visual presentation of data. Throw stock prices into a graph and a plain column of numbers tells a story of hard times and good times, surprises, impending doom or unrestrained growth; these are the stories we will tell our kids, picture books full of MACD trends and bollinger bands. Something I discovered while studying for lvl I, was that the same thing that I enjoyed learning could in fact help me learn it!

Pop open a new excel sheet and start tracking your hours. With some in-cell if statements you can make tables populate how much time you've spent on each section, and how much time you have left to your ### hour goal. The most important graph however is the hour tracking graph. By plotting date on the x-axis and hours studied on the y-axis you can visually see how your performance is trending. Be careful to use a bar chart, a line graph gives you the impression you are studying between periods. In fact run a 14 day MA chart below it, and you can see where your work tapers off. Basically the whole goal is to keep the graph trending up, piling more and more hours in each week as the exam gets closer. Make yourself look like a 1998 tech company; for me coaxing this graph upwards gave me more of a reason for "one more hour" than anything else I was doing.

Testing
Beyond some soul soothing excel playtime, the biggest thing I took away from level 1 was how much testing early helped. I don't have the time to start studying 2 months before the exam and devote major time daily, so I need to start really early. Because of this my ethics reading in September will suffer some major retention depreciation over the winter. By doing some tests along the way, and then doing nothing-but the month before, you are forced to keep things fresh, and you get feedback on where you failed to learn the first time. The CFA questions do an okay job at this, but the Stalla questions (or Schweiser I presume) poke at the content with enough of a different approach that you will quickly realize what was memorized and what was learned. And then in the last month, surround yourself with others writing the test. Me and a buddy would study all day on the weekend and then throw the hardest questions we had encountered at each other. It made it competitive which always helps with motivation, and provided an element of fear on a regular basis which helped us burn the oil in the week ahead.  

Will add more through the winter, for now Reading 22 needs its due attention.