Hey everyone, I'm a student at the University of Illinois about to take the series 3 exam in May. As of now, I have been studying materials from 2005 that I checked out of the library. Apparently there from securitiesexam.com and offer a few practice exams and whatnot. My question is, should I be concerned that these materials are so dated? I talked to a few people and they said there have been a lot of mergers among brokers and among exchanges â so some of those margin rules have changed. In addition, the implosion of the hyper-leverage and resulting increases in regulations probably impacted about 15% of the rules in 2005. I'm not sure what I should do, get new materials or continue to study with what I have? Any advice is appreciated. -Corey
I would say the material you have is enough to get you through it, but read through it thoroughly and know the conversions. Not a difficult test, especially if you have some industry experience.
There are a couple of kinds of questions that require knowledge. In these questions you are required to deal with shades of meanings. further, sometimes you will be asked what is incorrect about a statement. the general way people prep is to work 2 or 3 days with a tutor who earns his living tutoring. you will find he is up to date and he will put you through tests and then review your strengths and weeaknesses. Ususally the deal is that you will check in with him after the test. Once you know your strengths and weakenesses, you study some more and do tests to get your tesing speed up. Testing for financial tests is never vary complicated or difficult. the financial industry and its regulation is very sophomoric. Tests are usually related to licensing to sell stuff so you can see there is nothing difficult about it. It may be possible that a person could fail; that I do not know about.
Speaking of changes maybe you can clear this up seeing as you are a student presently and this would pertain to you specifically. I am gonna check the NFA site now as well, but as I recall, at one point the series 3 was one of, or the only license you could acquire without any type of sponsorship from a broker dealer. However the annual fee to maintain the series 3 license was rather large and expensive. Have you looked into this or is my memory simply wrong and the huge annual fees are only for folks like merchants, principles, floor brokers/traders, etc. ??
Thanks for the advice everyone. I'm getting the license for an internship I have this summer with an IB. Anyone can sit for the exam, but you must be sponsored by a broker in order to get the license. I think I'm going to go the tutor route to have someone that can keep me up to date with current regulations etc.