How to approach L2 Quants? difficult, anything, failure, about

cyber21

Hello - at my first (unsuccessful) attempt at L2 I took the view that if I looked after the big topics then that would be enough to get me over the line….it turns out that that was not the case…and my failure on exam day boiled down to me flunking the smaller sections… Quant, econ and alt, despite good performances elsewhere.
I don’t think there is anything particularly difficult about alt so I am not overly worried about improving my score there….econ is more of a war of attrition but again I think there is nothing insurmountable within it…
Then we come to quants - I just couldnt make any headway..be in the CFA text, using elans videos or schweser notes….in the end I got frustrated and ran out of time and just moved on to the next chapter.
Has anyone else had similar issues? Are there any other books/YouTube lectures anyone could recommend to get me moving on this topic?

bodhisattva

ELan free videos

anothercfainnyc

I have already bought elan - and I rate them…esp for derivatives… But not quants…any other suggestions?

jbaldyga

Just learn the assumptions and what Auto-Correlation, heteroskedasticity and multicollinearity is. That should be enough.

smuggycfa

L2 quants are mostly statistic. If you haven’t already, I would take a look at khan academy on statistics. They helped me when I was taking statistic in university which is already a deeper level than cfa covers.

meghanjackson

quant scores were horrible this year (worst performing by far according to the biased survey on here of 80% passers) .   i was sure i knew all quant answers but missed two.  there must have tricks so i wouldn’t take your low score this year too heavily.  most passers missed those quant questions as well!

d2rockstar

Thanks for the replies guys. I will take those points on board. I have started studying it again already but I am getting the same sinking feeling. I am just finding the material so abstract that retaining it is going to be really difficult.

sabre

OP I wouldn’t say AI was a small section. That hurt you.  Quant sucks. I hated studying quant. I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. It was too brutal.  I sacrificied that section and focused more on everything else. I studied enough to try and get 1-3 points if i was lucky.

HuskyGrad2010

Didn’t you like quants vids of Elan? I think they were pretty damn helpful for my preparation. Got >70 both times in quants -when i got a band 10 last year and now when i passed.

Chuckrox

Haha, you must be my twin. I was stretched for time, dedicated too little time on Quant (which I think was a major pain), port mgt. and econ and my results were indicative of that:
-Alternative Investments36–*
-Corporate Finance36–*
-Derivatives36*–
-Economics18*–
-Equity Investments72–*
-Ethical & Professional Standards36-*-
-Financial Reporting & Analysis72–*
-Fixed Income Investments18*–
-Portfolio Management18*–
-Quantitative Methods18*–
Now I need to read the CFAI material on the above subjects that I bombed. Plan on starting really early this time and not in February. Unfortunatley, the tought of studying Quant again just kills me.