CFA® Flashcards

This blog corresponds to my personal set of cue cards aka flashcards I made while studying for the CFA Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 exams. I ultimately passed all three exams and these are the actual notes I used as a significant portion of my exam preparation. I of course recommend doing as many exam style questions as you possibly can, including sitting six hour practice exams if you really want to earn the CFA Charter.

The original cards were written out by hand and may contain quotations from copyrighted material with no source attribution as they were often written late at night. No challenge to anyone’s copyright is intended. I will gladly give proper attribution of quotations if requested.

The cards are broken up into six categories which roughly correspond to the six major sections of the CFA Level 1 Curriculum at the time. It is a personal collection so the weightings are definitely off, the official weightings also change from time to time, these cards by no means represent a perfect summation of the CFA Curriculum. The original cards were colour coded. I used WordPress categories to represent my colour coding scheme. I also attempted to rate the importance of flashcards, that information was transfered to WordPress as the following tags in order of descending importance: Vital, Important, Useful. This is an ordinal ranking, something you’re going to need to know if you want to complete the CFA Program.

Additional tags were added to blog posts as deemed appropriate. If a post is tagged Level 2 it was added or edited after sitting the CFA Level 2 exam. After I sat the CFA Level 3 exam I carefully went through all the flashcards improving them and the associated tags, but the curriculum changes every year. CFA Level 1 Candidates will want to focus on Level 1 tagged posts. Level 3 CFA Candidates are not expected to remember everything from previous levels, but a lot of material does appear on more than one level such as the Code of Standards.

Each post represents one card. Each card is in a single category. The title of the blog post is the front of the card and the body of the blog post is the back of the card. This worked well enough for definitions and text heavy flashcards, but cards which correspond to formulas or contained diagrams were more difficult to input into WordPress. Eventually I resorted to photographs or redrawing diagrams. I even included the odd external link.

I previously posted personal study materials to my homepage. I was unsure if it was worth the time and effort to type out the cards or what digital format would be best. Given that there is now considerably more study materials available online legally (and illegally), I decided after sitting the CFA Level 1 exam again to type out my ever growing collection of flashcards and make them available online at WordPress.com. One benefit of this is you can search my collection of flashcards much quicker digitally than going through hundreds of paper cards, but I still maintained and reviewed primarily with paper index cards while I was a CFA Candidate.

DISCLAIMER: There is no guarantee of accuracy for this information. It is also not implied that this material has appeared on previous CFA exams nor is it implied that this material will appear on future CFA exams. This blog represents a portion of the material I studied in preparing for the CFA Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 examinations.

Good Luck!