amqata

A suggestion for quant -- use test prep material if you can. The CFAI texts are nearly impossible to get through and they're incredibly boring. I was in the same situation as you -- breezed through ethics and econ when studying initially, then hit a wall on quant. I foolishly spent 2 months on quant before I decided to pay up for test prep material. Then I breezed through quant in 1 week with the software and a much more condensed set of reading material. In the end it ended up being my strongest subject by far.


Other pieces of advice:

Read the stuff once, then just focus on doing questions. Only then will you actually be able to make sense of the formulas, and once you've done a ton of questions, the formulas that count and that end up on the exam end up coming naturally to you (some that come to mind include sharpe, safety first, covariance, standard deviation, mean, absolute mean deviation, R2).

For the really deep formulas like kurtosis and skewness, understand what they mean and understand how to evaluate on a chart, but don't worry really about memorizing. You will more than likely get a question or two on these topics but they probably won't ask you to calculate, just interpret (i.e. is this chart positively or negatively skewed, if you have an excess kurtosis of 1 what does that mean, etc.).

For the probability section, draw tree diagrams and you won't need to remember any formulas. I can never solve a Bayes theorem question using the formula, but I can solve them all day using tree diagrams.

So final advice - read through the material but don't overkill it, be mindful of how much time you're spending on the quant section (this is small relative to some big ones like ethics and FRA), do a lot of questions, and keep quizzing yourself as you go through your studies. In the end, I think you'll find that you won't have any problems with quant.