X,

Spend a lot of time on Munis and options. Take the tests, study your results, and THOROUGHLY understand why you got wrong the ones you did.

Go with the Dearborn CD and take a test a day for a month. When your getting mid to high 80’s you should be okay.

Read through or at a minimum skim through the book.  You it to
yourself to at least have a cursory understanding of the material.



If you can’t grasp the fundamental concepts behind options, create tables and memorize them.



Take a lot of exams.  In addition to learning the material, you
develop test taking strategies (e.g., process of elimination) and start
to get a feel for the logic as well as the types of trick questions
you’ll face on the actual exam.

Yes you should read the WHOLE book and then spend a lot more time on practive test questions on your computer.  You should plan to devote at least 60-80 hours to the process...MINIMUM.

...unless you like the prospect of repeating the process...

Thanks. I’m trying to skim through each unit and then taking the test on the vd for it. I’ll keep you updated.

Yeah the Passtrack books are excellent.  If you study those books and materials you will pass. No Doubt.  Know bonds and options (tricky) and you will do ok.  Spend time on bonds if you don’t understand them by the way.  Even though this is called a “stockbrokers” exam it is bond heavy. Trust me.

Drink a couple of shots of tequila every night before you start studying…

Cognac works good too LOL!

Try to get a hold of some PassPerfect test questions - those are real tough and have very good explanations when you get a question wrong.

I was able to pass the 7 with a 92% using Series 7 Drill and Practice
CD-ROM. It has tons of practice questions that are close to the actual
exam. If you are interested I can sell it to you for $88 it retails
$159 + Tax please e-mail [email protected] Thanks <!–
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I’ve been studying and getting pretty good with options and margins, but then I tend to forget the rest just a little. Thanks for the tips. I’m using the Dearborn stuff because thats what my company offers. If anyone has any other useful tips, feel free to let me know

I recently took and passed the 7 with a score of 84.   For family reasons, my study time was very limited and I was never able to have quiet whiled I studied.  Therefore, since everyone told me that options and margins were the hardest part of the exam, I decided to skip the entire sections and go back to studying them if I had time.  Needless to say, I never had time.  I never even glanced at the these section and never took a practice exam on on them.  When the test came, I wasn't even able to eliminate any of the answers on the options questions.  I'm sure that I got around a 25% on these. (The grading just shows that it was less than 50%.)

Anyway, I used Dearborn study material.  I was only able to find time to read the first two chapters (equity securities and debt securities).  What I did do, however, was take LOTS of practice exams both from the end of the chapters and from the CD.  I got to the point that I could get 95% on all the exams.  (This isn't that hard because you see the same questions over and over.  I did not include questions on options and margins.) 

I then took some practice final exams from BISYS.  On these, I only scored in the high 60's on my first go around.   This included options questions.  I was able to immediately figure out why my answers were wrong.

I went into the exam thinking that I had a 50/50 shot of passing.  The questions were much more similar to Dearborn than to BISYS.

Anyway, my advice for passing is to make sure that you can answer all practice exam questions AND take practice exams from more than one source.  I am not advising to skip options like I did.  It would have been very nice to say that I scored in the 90's (but meaningless). 

From all the people I know who have taken the 7, there seems to be two primary exams, the bond version and the option version. On the first half of my exam almost every other questions was about munis or other bonds, I kid you not. So I focused my time on learning bonds, munis and options and had a working knowledge or margin situations. If you get these four sections down you should be in good shape, not to mention the other 30% of the exam material is substantially easier stuff.

Just like everyone else has mentioned study your practice question, time and again. When you find out how close some of the questions will be you may laugh out loud.

If you know Options and Bonds inside out; you'll have a very very good chance at passing.  I agree with giff.

Good Luck!