Test Prep Strategy Guide

Last updated Dec 10, 2022 Edit Source

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# 📚 Buy a high-quality textbook and question bank

You’ll want to buy a textbook and question bank to aid in your study.

While it’s possible to fashion your study from free or cheap resources, it’s not recommended as you might be studying outdated information whenever the test is updated with new questions.

Cheap question banks also aren’t particularly representative of what might show up in the exam.

See Textbook & Question Bank Buying Guide for selecting a textbook and question bank.

When studying, you might also want to supplement textbooks with videos, which can help explicate unfamiliar topics.

# 🗓 Budget time to study

The exam is rich in material, so you’ll want to make sure you’ve cleared your schedule and can properly focus on studying. This isn’t an exam that can be passed with just a few weeks of revision, unless you’re already deeply familiar with the topics.

If you’ve never worked in any capacity in finance, and are coming to this completely fresh, then you would want to budget about 3–4 months of full-time studying or 4–5 months part-time.

If you have had some experience as a trader or investor, and are familiar with financial assets (like Stocks, bonds, Options, Futures, and Commodities) and economics concepts, but you don’t have an in-depth understanding of U.S. financial regulations, then you could spend 2–3 months full-time, or 3–4 months part-time.

If you’ve previously worked in finance, and are familiar with U.S. financial regulations, as well as common financial assets and basic economics, you might be able to get away with spending just 1–2 months of revision armed with a good textbook, like the 📖 Kaplan Series 65 Securities License Exam Manual.

This is just a rule of thumb, however. Before commiting to a date for the exam, make sure you’re able to make progess at a comfortable pace, and factor in time you’ll need to revise (3–4 weeks).

# ✌️ Split study into two phases

The exam is rich in concepts you have to deeply understand, as well as facts & figures you’ll just have to memorize.

We recommend splitting your study time into two phases:

An initial study phase where ypu’re more concerned with deeply understanding the material, and dilligently notetaking followed by:
A revision phase about 3–4 weeks before the exam where you’re focused on memorizing facts & figures, as well as doing as many practice exam questions as possible

# 🔦 When revising, focus on highly-weighted topics

As you might have seen in the exam specifications, not all topics are evenly weighted in the exam.

As such, you shouldn’t focus your study and revision time equally on all topics, as many of them will take a long time to study but aren’t heavily tested. Some units, like Tax Considerations or Insurance-Based Products, will only see two questions appear on your exam, whereas the material is rich in facts & figures to memorize. These topics are not the best use of your time, as opposed to those with four or more questions.

A simple trick to passing is to focus on revising those unis where most questions will appear, and out of those, those where you are most weak in.

The one topic you’ll absolutely want to memorize cover-to-cover is Laws, Regulations, and Guidelines. This topic is rich in questions as well as facts & figures that need to be memorized, such as dates, figures, exclusions, and exemptions.

The other topics that I recommend focusing on during the revision phase are:

Calculations found in Financial Reporting, Analytical Methods, and Performance Measures (four questions each)
The different types of plans and their differences, in Retirement Plans Including ERISA Issues and Educational Funding Programs (a total of seven questions)

# 🔢 Order to study each topic

Different textbooks present each of the four topics covered in the exam in a different order. There is no canonical order you should study in, since the concepts being tested are highly interweaved across all four topics.

When studying, you’ll want to study in a way where concepts build on each other naturally. The way the topics are interweaved makes it difficult, but I’ve found the most natural order to be:

When revising, you’ll want to prioritize topics that are more heavily tested, as mentioned above. This lends us to this particular order:

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