Hi! I have recently finished the course and in the process of taking the practice exams. My employer requires us to take their course as well (which I have done) before testing. It was sooooo long, drawn out, and dry that by the time I had finished I’d nearly forgotten everything from the beginning. Your course has been so MUCH easier to understand and has been incredibly helpful. However after going back to complete the final exams from my employer’s course, I’m noticing a large amount of info not covered in this course. I’m assuming it wasn’t included because there hasn’t been much of an indication that’s it’s actually covered on the test? I know their questions are closely guarded, but I guess I was wondering if others who have already taken it could give a little assurance that my employer’s course is a bit of overkill.
Just off the top of my head, material such as specific portfolio re-balancing strategies re allocation/mitigation, routing methods of limit orders and timing/order priority, bond orders like ‘good for 2 hrs 5 min recall,’ many q’s regarding how long specific documents must be retained by b/d, having to know a lot of specific IRS form #s and %s (portfolio income tax vs ordinary income tax), and a ton more. Just the print material itself completely fills two 3" binders. #drowninginpaper
Great questions! First, you’re right regarding FINRA’s guarding of the test questions. All that FINRA provides to determine what the exam will cover is the SIE Test Outline and the SIE practice exam. The topics listed on the outline and tested on the practice exam are broadly covered on Achievable’s program. However, the depth of material covered is where Achievable sometimes differs with other vendors. Other SIE programs flood their materials with concepts we believe are lightly tested and relatively unimportant for the exam.
Regardless, we strive to keep our materials up-to-date and relevant as much as possible. We won’t fully disclose our methods or reasons for covering the topics we do (it’s our “secret sauce”), but we’re very confident that using our program is a recipe for success on the exam. Mastering the topics we cover are what’s necessary to obtain a passing score.
FINRA exams change over time, and we pay close attention to FINRA publications and other resources to determine if a topic should be covered. As soon as we feel a topic is important to cover, we implement it into our program. I consider most of the specific topics you specifically listed as “in the weeds” and not important enough to include in our material. However, we’ve been working on adding a section on record retention (documents a B/D must keep on file), which will be available by the end of day tomorrow. I’ll post an update on this thread when it becomes available.
I hope this helps describe our approach to cultivating our material. Best of luck to you in your studies!
We now have a new section - Record retention requirements. We added an additional 47 exam questions and 15 practice questions / flashcards, which will be uploaded and available by end of day tomorrow.
Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks for reaching out, @Mcjb210!