1-Month SIE Study Plan

A month at roughly an hour a day is the most forgiving way to prepare for the SIE® exam: week one covers capital markets and equities, weeks two and three carry the heavyweight products and trading sections, and week four is regulation, review, and two full timed mocks. No finance background assumed, and every day’s topics link to free practice questions.

This is the zero-background, full-time-job plan. Studying six days a week with one day off, you’ll put in 25–30 hours total, spread thin enough that nothing has to be crammed. If your timeline is tighter, the 2-week SIE study plan runs the same syllabus at two hours a day, and the 1-week SIE study plan exists for the truly deadline-bound.

How the Month Maps to the Exam

The SIE weights its four sections 16/44/31/9, so Products and Risks (Section 2) gets a full week and a half here, Trading and Accounts (Section 3) a week, and the two smaller sections share the remainder. Each week ends with a checkpoint quiz; checkpoints are how you catch a weak topic in week two instead of on exam day. New to the exam itself? Start with what the SIE exam is: format, fee, and how it fits the license ladder.

Week 1, Capital Markets, Plus Your First Equities

• Day 1: Baseline first: try 10 questions, no signup. Then meet the regulators (SEC, FINRA, MSRB, CBOE) via regulators and SROs.
• Day 2: SIPC and FDIC. SIPC: $500,000 per customer, at most $250,000 of it cash, protection against broker-dealer failure, never market losses. FDIC: bank deposits only.
• Day 3: Market structure, primary vs. secondary, and economic factors: the Fed fights inflation by selling Treasuries and raising rates.
• Day 4: Offerings: IPOs, firm commitment vs. best efforts, prospectus rules.
• Day 5: Common stock (last in a liquidation, after creditors, bondholders, and preferred) and preferred stock.
• Day 6 (checkpoint): the Section 1 question set. Anything under comfortable, re-read that topic’s explanations before week two.

Week 2, Products and Their Risks, Part One

Section 2 is 44% of the exam, 33 of your 75 scored questions, which is why it gets the most calendar.

• Day 8: Rights and warrants and ADRs.
• Day 9: Debt fundamentals: corporate bonds and the exam’s favorite relationship. Bond prices move inversely to interest rates.
• Day 10: Government debt and municipal bonds: GO bonds lean on taxing power; revenue bonds on project revenues alone.
• Day 11: Money-market instruments, plus ETNs, unsecured notes whose defining risk is issuer credit risk.
• Day 12: Options, day one: calls, puts, strike, premium, and ITM (a call is in the money when market price exceeds strike).
• Day 13 (checkpoint): Options, day two: covered vs. uncovered, protective puts as insurance on long stock, the OCC as guarantor. Two days on options is deliberate; it’s the most feared topic and the most learnable one.

Week 3, Products Part Two, Then Trading and Accounts

• Day 15: Mutual funds: open-end funds price at the next-computed NAV (forward pricing) and don’t trade on exchanges, vs. ETFs, closed-end funds, and UITs, which do.
• Day 16: Variable annuities, REITs and DPPs, and 529 plans and ABLE accounts, 529s take after-tax money, pay out tax-free for qualified expenses, and the owner keeps control. Then investment risks, and run the Section 2 question set as your mid-plan checkpoint.
• Day 17: Order types (a sell stop triggers a market order at or through the stop price, protecting a long position) plus quotes and bid–ask and long vs. short.
• Day 18: Settlement and dividends, the stale-fact minefield (current as of July 2026): regular way is T+1 since May 28, 2024, and the ex-dividend date now generally falls on the record date itself. Buy no later than one business day before record date to get the dividend.
• Day 19: Corporate actions, account types (Reg T initial margin: 50%), and account registrations including UTMA.
• Day 20 (checkpoint): Retirement accounts (RMDs start at age 73 under SECURE 2.0) then your first full timed mock: SIE practice exam 1, 75 questions in 105 minutes. Whatever the score, extract your three weakest topics for week four.

Week 4, Rules, Regulation, and Readiness

• Day 22: AML: placement, layering, integration; CTRs on cash over $10,000 in a business day; SARs at $5,000 with suspicion; structuring is itself a crime.
• Day 23: Prohibited activities (pump-and-dump, freeriding, front running) and insider trading. Add Reg BI and suitability.
• Day 24: All of Section 4’s thresholds in one sitting: registration and CE (Regulatory Element is annual, due December 31, not the old three-year cycle), Forms U4 and U5, gifts and gratuities ($300 per person per year under FINRA Rule 3220, effective March 30, 2026) and OBA and private securities transactions (written notice; approval if compensated). Confirm with the Section 4 question set.
• Day 25: Weak-topic repair, round one: re-drill the three topics mock #1 exposed. Read the explanations for every miss: the trap has a name and the rule has a citation.
• Day 26: Weak-topic repair, round two, plus a run through the SIE flashcards by section.
• Day 27 (checkpoint): Final mock in the SIE exam simulator, timed, 75 questions, 105 minutes, no notes. The SIE has no guessing penalty, so answer everything.
• Day 28: Light review only: one pass through the SIE cheat sheet, confirm your Prometric logistics via what to expect on test day, and stop early. Rest is preparation.

If Week 4 Says You’re Not Ready

A final mock comfortably above the exam’s passing score of 70, on questions you haven’t seen, is a fair green light. Well short of it? Reschedule without guilt: the fee is $100 per attempt, and the retake waiting periods mean a rushed fail costs more time than a planned two-week extension. Keep drilling practice questions by topic until the numbers hold; free means free, however long it takes.