A Ten-Week Study Plan

The schedule

Week 1 — Foundations and equity. Module 1 and Module 2. Light week by design; the point is to establish the study habit and get the exam's structure into your head so everything afterwards has somewhere to go. End the week by writing down the four functions and their item counts from memory.

Week 2 — Debt, part one. Lessons 3.1 to 3.3. Bond pricing, accrued interest and the four yields are the arithmetic foundation for Module 4, so do not move on until the yield ordering is automatic. Revisit: Module 2's voting and rights formulas.

Week 3 — Debt, part two. Lessons 3.4 to 3.6. Treasuries, agencies, money market and CMOs. Revisit: the four yields.

Week 4 — Municipals. All of Module 4. This is the heaviest single week in the plan and it is deliberately early, while your energy is high. Municipals are where candidates lose the exam, and they are entirely learnable. Revisit: debt fundamentals.

Week 5 — Packaged products. All of Module 5. Mutual fund arithmetic and the variable annuity rules carry the most questions here. Revisit: municipals — specifically the tax treatment and the GO-versus-revenue analysis.

Week 6 — Options, part one. Lessons 6.1 to 6.3, plus daily calculation drills. Do twenty profit-and-loss problems a day, on paper, without a calculator. Revisit: packaged products.

Week 7 — Options, part two. Lessons 6.4 to 6.6 and the same daily drills, now including spreads and straddles. First full-length practice exam at the end of this week — early and deliberately, so it is a diagnostic rather than a verdict. Expect a disappointing score; the value is in the error analysis. Revisit: municipals again.

Week 8 — Markets, trading and new issues. Modules 7 and 8. Comparatively easy material with good marks-per-hour. Revisit: options calculations, daily.

Week 9 — Accounts, margin and tax. Module 9, which is dense, plus daily margin drills. Second full-length practice exam at the end of the week. Revisit: everything the first practice exam exposed.

Week 10 — Conduct and consolidation. Module 10 and Module 11. Third and fourth full-length practice exams, taken cold on different question sets, spaced two or three days apart. Repair whatever they surface. Stop studying new material 48 hours before the exam.

The weighting behind that: two weeks on debt and one on municipals is three of ten weeks on fixed income, two weeks on options, one on packaged products. That is roughly the shape of Function 3, which is 73 percent of the exam.

The revisits are the plan

Every week above carries a revisit line, and those lines are the part that gets cut when a week goes badly. Cutting them is what produces a candidate who knows Module 9 and has lost Module 4.

A revisit is twenty to thirty minutes, and it is retrieval rather than reading. Close the material. Write down the flow of funds, or the four yields with their ordering, or the six option positions with their three numbers. Then check. The gap between what you wrote and what is there is the only honest measure of where you stand, and it is also the highest-value study you will do that week.

The spacing follows the evidence in lesson 1.5: gaps of days to a couple of weeks, widening as the exam approaches. Module 2 is revisited in week 2 and again around week 6 and week 10. Municipals in weeks 5, 7 and 10.

The practical failure mode is that revisits have no deadline, so they lose to material that does. The fix is to give them one: put them in a system that will surface them whether or not you remember.

Practice exams and what to do with them

Four full-length exams, at the end of weeks 7, 9, and twice in week 10. Timed, closed book, in one sitting, on material you did not study that day.

After each one, do the error analysis rather than the score. Classify every wrong answer into one of four categories.

Did not know — a genuine knowledge gap. Goes on the revisit list for the following week.

Knew but was slow — the answer was there but took too long. This is an automaticity problem and it is fixed by drilling that calculation, not by rereading the lesson.

Misread — answered the affirmative version of a NOT question, or gave a per-share figure where the contract was asked for. This is a process problem and the fix is procedural: underline the negative, multiply by 100 last.

Guessed right — worth flagging, because it is a knowledge gap the score is hiding. Count these as errors when planning the next week.

A candidate whose errors are mostly category one after week 9 needs more study. A candidate whose errors are mostly categories two and three needs more practice, not more reading, and the distinction is worth being honest about.

Readiness is two consecutive cold, timed, full-length scores comfortably clear of the passing mark on different question sets. One good score is inside the noise of a sample this size.

Compressing to six weeks

A firm's study window is often four to six weeks with the exam booked at the end. The plan compresses, but not by removing the revisits.

Six-week version. Week 1: Modules 1 and 2 and the first half of Module 3. Week 2: the rest of Module 3 and all of Module 4. Week 3: Module 5 and the first half of Module 6. Week 4: the rest of Module 6, plus Modules 7 and 8; first practice exam at the end. Week 5: Modules 9 and 10; second practice exam. Week 6: Module 11, consolidation, two further practice exams, and repair.

What gives way under compression is depth on the low-weight material — the exchange and NYSE rules, the more obscure municipal note types, the outer edges of the tax lessons. What must not give way is options and margin drilling, municipal tax treatment, or the revisits.

If the window is under four weeks and you have no industry background, the honest answer is to ask for more time or accept a meaningful probability of a retake. A retake costs 15 calendar days and another attempt; going in unprepared costs that plus the credibility hit at a new firm.