I’m mid-30s. Business Degree. Taught high school 6 years. nothing special before that. No real finance background before this past summer. It took 5 months working full time but maybe 5-6 weeks of that I didn’t spend any time studying. I do better cramming in more stuff in a week than spreading it out. Up to you on that.
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Started with SIE and read the text front to back doing the quizzes after each one. Took about 3 weeks to feel prepared and the practice tests helped immensely. I think the SIE was tough because it was the first one and you don’t have any practice yet with a FINRA test. take as many practice Exams as possible.
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Series 7 felt bigger than it really is. I suggest skimming over the repeated material and take the quizzes to make sure you retained the SIE material but don’t spend the time rereading the repeated sections. Use Series 7 Guru on Youtube to help with options. After that, it’s alot of municipal bonds and mutual funds. Once you have a system down for doing options questions, take alot of practice exams. Look at questions you weren’t sure and read the explanations. take notes. take more exams until those you don’t need to look at the notes as often.
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Series 66 was the toughest in my opinion. Don’t let the smaller number of broader topics fool you into thinking there is less material. There are a ton of details you’ll need to have ingrained. biggest topics are ethics and regulation, investment recs/strategies, and NPV, Cash flow, etc. By this time, if you take this third, you should have the general securities characteristics down. With this test I found reading the text to be less helpful because it’s harder to determine what to memorize. Take practice exam after practice exam. read the explanations of questions that are wrong to create your own study guide.
Thanks Achievable!