did lvl1 cfa in december 2007 and passed
going to do lvl2 this june

on and lvl 1 is doable in june and december of same year
lvl2 and 3 are only once a year in june

Congratulations!

From what I've heard level two is meant to be the toughest of the three. I passed level one in Dec, would of been nice to have six months off before starting level two... I take it your back studying now?

ya already ordered all the materials and started studying, although kinda slacking off at the moment, just started the quantitative methods...

I also hear lvl2 is tough, I think I still have enough time to study though.
I put in probably 1.5 month of studying into lvl1, although I did a lot of hours / week

You have plenty of time, if you started studying now... it's all about racking up the hours, I don't think any of the level two is stuff is particularly hard, just a sheer volume of content to get through!

well i left that firm but i'm at a new one now and dacy is my 1st dzone protege- everyone wish him luck he just started trading real money about a month ago.

Woo! Good luck. I'll be reconsidering my career options early 2012, perhaps will give another serious thought to trading.

so far so good! DM is a great teacher and is very patient with me, since I came from a consulting/telecom background. I am up my first month

Out of curiosity, what are you fellas trading?

day trading the yield curve with treasury futures

Ah. Fed day must be a crazy one in your office.

Don't you worry that that strategy has "pennies in front of a steamroller" risk? You can bet on curve flattening so long as the Fed remains accommodative and various deflationary pressures remain, but eventually the curve might steepen so rapidly that you end up wiped out in short order. I mean, look what happened to the sovereign curves of some of the eurozone countries... S.c.a.r.y.!

Personally, I think that the long end of the curve is terrifyingly mispriced right now. Lending money for 30 years at less than 4% interest - no matter your counterparty - makes no sense at all. I suspect that a bunch of policy makers - both monetary and legislative - would like to see a little inflation in order to accelerate the deleveraging in our economy (it would also be a stealthy wealth tax)... that long end is going to perform terribly if they get their way. Granted, in the near term, OpTwist and any future QE is going to do a fine job of suppressing it...

Good luck guys! Trading the yield curve is just a little too hairy for me! Too many countervailing factors - and too damn dependent on Fed policy!

we are always flat going into fed or unemployment- but other than that don't really care which way things move. we get flat each day before leaving, so the only moves that can really get us our intraday sweeps, and even then it really takes quite a large move for us to get into any real trouble. also if we see a true vol upswing like in europe (which i expect will come, probably sooner than we believe) we'll just have to start jumping on board moves rather than fading them as we generally do now.

as to your projections about the long end and inflation- i basically agree with all of them. it is also an interesting way of combating the emerging markets. if we can cause inflation to double energy and food prices, that will kill their economies much more than ours since they spend such a larger percentage of their income on those resources.

we also generally trade butterflies, so aren't making so much of a bet on curve steepening or flattening, but just that things do it more or less equally throughout the curve on any given day.