I passed the SIE exam a couple of days ago and wanted to capture some thoughts while it is still fresh in my mind.
Background:
I had been a passive investor in stocks with no particular strategy besides buy and hold reputable stocks and hope that they grow. As one would expect from a strategy based on “hope”, unluckily there weren’t any windfalls but also luckily not many scars as I have had a low risk appetite. My background is in Software Industry but looking to get into professional trading.
Exam research and training material:
Given the short history of SIE, there aren’t many experiences shared online but I quickly found out Pass Perfect, STC, ExamZone, Kaplan, Knopman are a few vendors in the Securities Exams space. From whatever tidbits I could gather online, it appeared that no vendor yet developed an optimal training program/content for SIE. So at best, any material at this point in time would probably be an amalgamation of various legacy course materials to cover as much as of the broad FINRA’s content outline for SIE.
I was primarily looking for self-study training material, not necessarily in an e-book format as I felt that mode of content consumption would be too static for SIE. I was also looking for On-Demand lectures to help with difficult topics with YouTube as backup. Pass Perfect has what they call SMART Interactive Web Training which along with their On-Demand lecture videos fit the bill for me. I also found a 20% coupon on their twitter feed, so that was sweet. In addition, just so I don’t get blindsided just by one vendor content, I also bought kindle version of Pass the SIE from Exam Zone.
Exam Prep
I liked how Pass Perfect starts with Equities as compared to Regulatory Agencies by Pass the SIE because Equities topic is less dry and more familiar so it helped me in getting used to the overall course content. I first started with reading each chapter followed by the lecture video and finished with practice exams. Each practice question has an explanation of the answer and some also have voice over elaborations which was pretty cool.
I probably spent 4–5 hours a day for about 3–4 days going through the training and covered just Equities and Debt topics. I also started experiencing fatigue with Pass Perfect’s very vast course coverage coupled with their countless questions in practice exams and quizzes. For example, they make you answer a single concept around debt yields slicing and dicing it in 20 different ways in a single practice exam. It seemed an overkill for an exam that’s named “Essentials”. So I pivoted to watching only the lecture videos and then directly jumping into practice questions with the intent of referring the course material only for topics that I needed reinforcement. With this approach, my practice score percentages fell to around 80s which I was OK with. I was able to cover content faster and see all the pieces come together. I wrapped up the course this way after about a week and scheduled the exam to 3 days later so that I have some time for revision and final practice exams. So in total about 2 weeks from start to finish.
I first took a final exam from Pass Perfect and scored 77% which I was reasonably happy with as my first practice exam score. But I think they had about 100 questions and it again felt like a drag. So next I took the exam from Pass the SIE and scored exactly 70%. I got little worried as I found it more difficult than I expected it to be but it made sense as they must have tailored it to their own material and not Pass Perfect’s. To get a better idea on where I stood, I took the one practice test that is on FINRA’s site and comfortably scored above 80%. I re-read the couple of areas I struggled which in my case were Regulations, Customer Accounts and took the second exam from Pass the SIE. This time I scored closer to 80% and felt ready for the exam.
Exam Day
I was a little surprised to see the exam screen show 85 questions in 1 hour 45 minutes as FINRA website said 75 questions in the same duration. So this means, 10 additional questions to answer within the same time. My exam strategy was to “Mark for Review” only the questions that I’m not confident of the answer so as to minimize the number of questions that needs to be revisited. I finished answering all the questions with about 20 minutes to spare and with 25 questions Marked for Review. This put me at 70% exam score and at this point I was fairly confident of passing the exam as I was sure of getting at least 50% of those 25 correct. I probably changed answers to about 5 questions before submitting the exam right on clock and I was happy to see the results screen show “Pass”. This means that I can now move onto the Series 57 exam.
Conclusion
I thought FINRA did a great job with the depth they tested on SIE. Definitely one needs to be reasonably comfortable with what’s covered in 1933, 1934 acts, Customer Accounts, product packages, debt basics, order types, prohibited actions and options. Pass Perfect reading content was definitely an overkill for SIE. Also, I don’t remember seeing any questions with roman numeral descriptions in the actual exam but the Pass Perfect’s question bank is inundated with such questions so that’s misleading in addition to being unnecessary brain drain during the prep. Although it looked like majority if not all of their lecture videos were originally developed for Series 7, delivery by the instructor Alvin Hall was top notch and adequately addresses SIE content IMO. Their Quick SIE reference is also useful to quickly jump to topics. I think for SIE purposes, it’s best to get through all the content as quickly and coherently one can and follow it up with practice exams and revisions.
Good Luck !
P.S -> Goes without saying that this was what worked for me and it may not suit everyone. I tried to give some insight into where I was coming from in terms of trading experience and how I approached the whole thing.
