Built around the concepts that actually move your score — weighted the way the exam weights them. Designed for candidates with full-time jobs, full calendars, and a real study budget, not a textbook one.
Sit a full, topic-weighted Level 1 mock — written by recent candidates, calibrated to the way the real exam tests. Submit when you're done and get an instant scored report broken down by topic, plus a worked explanation for every single question.
Start with the Ethics chapter to see how we write. Step up to Notes for the full curriculum. Move to Working Pro when you want the videos, question bank, and weekly office hours that take you to exam day.
The highest-weighted topic on Level 1, in 60+ pages of plain-English explanation. A working sample of how Totten Prep teaches.
Two sample lessons are free. Create an account to read them now.
Create account to buy →All ten topic areas, weighted the way the exam tests them. ~500 pages of distilled notes covering the entire Level 1 curriculum.
For the self-directed candidate. Read, drill, sit the exam.
Create account to buy →Everything in Founder’s Notes, plus the video walkthroughs, question bank, mocks, and weekly office hours that get you to exam day.
For the candidate who wants one product, end to end, without piecing it together.
Create account to buy →A note on pricing: comparable full-system bundles in this market start around $1,300. Working Pro is intentionally priced below the threshold most employers reimburse without manager approval. By design.
Someone with 400 free hours, unlimited patience for video, and no other claims on the calendar. The real candidate has a job, a life, and a fixed window of study time — and needs prep designed around those constraints, not against them.
The exam weights some topics at 15–20% and others at 5–7%. Most prep doesn’t differentiate. You spend the same effort on a topic worth a quarter of the points as one worth a twentieth — and you find out which was which on exam day.
Two-hundred hours of video. Thousand-page textbooks. Plans that quietly require you to read every page. Excellent material if you’re a full-time student; impractical if you’re working, parenting, or studying for any other reason that takes calendar space.
Tone is committee-flat. Examples are generic. The book can’t tell you which footnotes actually matter on exam day — so you finish a chapter and quietly hope you remembered the right things.
One product reads to you. Another quizzes you. A third explains the questions. You end up stitching three subscriptions together — which is the problem you were trying to avoid by buying prep in the first place.
Totten Prep is built by people who just sat for Level 1 — not by academics, not by lifelong publishers. That matters because the candidate knows what actually gets tested, where the time gets wasted, and which concepts return the most points per hour studied. The material is written the way a candidate would explain it to another candidate over coffee: direct, calibrated to weight, and willing to say which 20% of the curriculum drives 50% of the score.
High-weight topics get deep coverage. Low-weight topics get the minimum that gets you the points. You’ll know which is which.
A 250-hour study plan that respects the calendar you have, with hours allocated to where they earn the most marks.
A textbook’s job is to be complete. Our job is to be useful. We’ll tell you when to skip something, and why.
Topic weights based on published CFA Institute Level 1 ranges. Our content coverage, practice questions, and study plan hours follow the same ratios.
Most prep is trying to look comprehensive. We’re trying to get you to a pass with the time you actually have.
Totten Prep was started by a CFA Level 1 candidate — not a publisher, not an academic, not a committee. The original notes are the ones the founder built for themselves while preparing for the exam under the constraints we now design around: a full-time job, a limited study window, and a refusal to read pages that wouldn’t be tested.
We keep the team small and the focus narrow. Every chapter, every question, every explanation is written or reviewed by someone who has recently sat in the exam chair. That’s the entire point of the brand.
Create a free account with just email and password to unlock the 90-question mock exam and the free Ethics lessons. Takes 20 seconds.