300Hours: How to create your ideal CFA study plan.

Hi WSO. I’m both an old-timer and newbie here - been missing in action for a few years (children!), but I’m back now.

I mainly post about the CFA exams but have considerable experience in tech M&A, management consulting and corporate finance as well. Any questions just comment below and I’ll reply.

I hope to post here about once or twice a month going forward.

January CFA toolkit: How to create an effective study plan

I got my CFA charter back in 2011 and since then, through 300Hours.com I’ve been helping candidates pass their CFA exams.

January is typically a busy month for the typical CFA candidate. June exam candidates are starting their studies, and December exam candidates are flipping out about their results (should be coming next Tuesday!).

For this post, I’ll focus on study plans - how to create an effective one for yourself.

You guys are obviously no strangers to studying so this may seem a little basic, but the CFA exams will be a different beast to what you’ve encountered before. Every little advantage helps you tip the odds in your favor, and a well-thought-out, CFA-tuned study plan is definitely one of them.

It doesn’t matter which study plan you use as long as you DO plan out how you’re going to study and cover the principles outlined below. But to help you get started, we have a ready-made study planner for you - you can generate one for yourself here for free and get started right away.

Here are the 3 ‘P’s to creating an effective study plan. Please excuse the cheesy acronyms. I’m old, and I believe acronyms help people remember things they’d rather forget.

1: Plan. Allocate enough time for studying

The average candidate spends 300 hours preparing for each level of the CFA exams (hence 300Hours.com - CFA Institute gets arsey if we use ‘cfa’ in domain names...).

This is just a guide though - it can vary from 200-500 hours depending on your pre-exam knowledge and how well you take to the curriculum. Don’t assume that as long as you put in 300 hours you’ll pass - it’s different for everyone.

But the 300 hours rule is useful in telling you how much time you should allocate to studying in the next few months

Any study plan you come up with should realistically block off about 300 hours to study for the CFA exam. The less you allocate, the less likely you are to pass.

If you’re using our study planner, it automatically recommends 300 hours to start with - you can then adjust your weekly schedule and total hours to suit your work and study style.

2: Progress. Track what you’ve covered, and what you have left.

There are up to 10 topic areas in each CFA Level. They are not weighted equally, so make sure your efforts match their importance to the exam.

Some study plans may emphasize the time you’ve put in, or the number of pages you’ve read.

Although these metrics help, they are not the right thing to be focusing on.

Any study plan you create should focus on the % of the exam curriculum you’ve covered, because that’s what ultimately matters in your exam performance. Prioritize topics that stand to gain you the most points.

Our planner focuses on two main metrics:
hours studied to show your efforts so far
% exam curriculum to show you what you’ve achieved

It alerts you if you’re falling behind, i.e. the % exam curriculum you’re covering is not keeping up with the time you have left to the exam. It also shows you the topics you should be focusing on, based on your mastery levels and what you have or haven’t studied.

3: Perform. Measure how well you’re doing.

To pass the exams, you should measure how well you’re doing in mock exams and feed that back to your revision.

Only about 40% of candidates pass the CFA exams every year (although 300Hours readers average 83%). The passing mark is not made public, but we’ve estimated that historically it’s been about 59%-65% across the years and levels.

If you’re anything like me, you’re probably going to score only about 50+% in your first mock. Don’t worry, you’ll improve. Score 70% and above in your mocks consistently and you’re doing well - you should be in the safe zone. 80% and above would be a really good place to be.

Your mock score should be a good proxy for how well you would do in the actual CFA exam. Our study planner takes it one step further: if you’ve entered your progress into our study planner, it even takes a shot at predicting your CFA score. This takes into account your study progress, mastery at each CFA reading and mock exam performance benchmarks.

Please don’t study without at least a rough plan. It’s unlikely to work out well.

Whether you create your own plan or use a ready-made one, do get some structure into your CFA studies, even if it’s something rough.

As long as it blocks off enough time, tracks your progress and measures your performance, that’ll make a hell of a difference towards your pass chances.

If you’re not sure how to get started, give our study planner a spin. It basically creates a fancy Google Sheets-based planner specifically for you, with a lot of pre-input data and benchmarks to help you track and benchmark how you’re doing. It doesn't overly complicate things, just focuses on helping you study to pass.

If you have any feedback on the planner I'd love to hear about it too..

Any questions, just give me a shout below! See you guys again soon.