CFA® Level 1 Problem Set

When I was a younger more naive CFA Candidate I created a bunch of study materials for my study group. In order to prove my righteousness I gave away my study materials online, partly to shame my MBA Classmates and the Sauder School of Business.

If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

I have not achieved wisdom, but I did achieved righteous fury against Abhishek Chaudhary who decided it was a good idea to take files I’d upload to the internet and given away for free and then post them on Scribd where he foolishly claimed copyright for them. I say foolishly because this is both against the law, against the user agreement of the website, and probably against Standard I(C) Misrepresentation.

I started creating problems for my CFA Level 1 study group but then my study group kinda fell apart. I thought the actual act of creating the problems and trying to reverse engineer them and cook up additional variations in and of itself had merits and benefits, so I kept doing it long after my study group fell apart.

Last weekend CFA Vancouver offered the Boston Security Analysts Society exam. This is a really good practice exam to take if you can. As this is my second time doing the CFA Level 1 examination I’ve used the last two years’ BSAS exams as sources for some of my questions. Other sources include the official books, Schweser notes, even the dim recesses of my memory.

This is a set of practice problems, not a practice exam. There aren’t a 120 questions, there are no Ethics questions, pretty much all the questions are number crunching ones. It is not weighted as the exam is weighted.

Update March 22, 2012

It is against the CFA Code of Conduct now to write online about what questions appeared on previous exams, what material was covered and what wasn’t covered. I doubt the changes apply retroactively to blog posts made in 2008, but just in case I’m editing older posts to try and ensure compliance.

These are questions I personally had some difficulty with or someone in my study group did. They are in the style of CFA Level 1 exam questions from that time period so four multiple choice options. There is no guarantee of accuracy and certainly no indication that this material was tested in the past or will be tested in the future.

I made the Excel file available to help fellow candidates, you should consult the most recent official CFA Institute published curriculum rather than rely on documents downloaded from a random blog on the Internet.

Update August 30th 2018

I finally passed the third and final CFA Exam. I’ve continued to put way to much work into my website and CFA study material I gave away for free. There is not a lot of ROI from free labor, especially when people are so ungrateful that they claim copyright over your freely available work.

This entry was originaly posted on May 8th, 2008, it was last edited on February 19th, 2019 and is filed under: Finance and tagged: CFA®, Exam, Level 1, Microsoft Excel, Practice Problems.