Como passei na CPA 2026 de primeira | Meu método de estudo

Summary

Bruno describes how he prepared for and passed the CPA certification in 2026. His approach focused primarily on practice questions, rather than extensive textbook reading or video lessons. He studied for about a month, starting February 3, usually for one to two hours a day, with a few days off.

His study method

He used four resources, roughly in order of importance:

1. Top Invest practice tests

   • He built or selected practice tests and answered the questions before studying each topic in depth—a “reverse study” approach.
   • He completed 29 practice tests, with an average score of about 73%.
   • He treated low scores as a way to identify what he needed to learn, rather than as a reason to stop.

2. ChatGPT

   • When he got a question wrong, he pasted it into ChatGPT and asked for an explanation from the beginning, making clear that he was starting with little knowledge.
   • If an explanation was unclear, he asked for it to be explained again and researched unfamiliar concepts to connect the ideas.
   • He then revisited questions, sometimes repeating them the following day.

3. A small notebook

   • He wrote down concepts and subjects that appeared often in practice tests or seemed important.
   • His notes covered financial-system structure and institutions, markets and products, investor suitability and customer identification, investment risks, taxation, and other exam concepts.

4. Selected YouTube videos

   • He watched a small number of videos from Professor Renan Duarte’s channel, using them to explore particular topics rather than as his main study resource.

Topics he highlighted

His notes and practice covered subjects including:

• The national financial system, financial intermediation, and the roles of institutions such as the Monetary Council, CVM, and Central Bank.
• Investor profiles, suitability, “know your customer” procedures, and market volatility.
• Products such as CDBs, government bonds, debentures, investment funds, and credit-rights funds.
• Dividends, interest on equity, tax rules, follow-on offerings, and market terminology.
• Blockchain, decentralized finance, and investment-analysis measures such as net present value, internal rate of return, payback, and ROI.

His experience of the exam

Bruno reports scoring 42 out of 50 and says the exam covered 33 topics. He found it lengthy and sometimes tricky: questions could contain a lot of information, so candidates needed to identify what was relevant and understand the underlying concepts. He did not consider it impossibly difficult, but felt it distinguished candidates who understood the material from those who did not.

Topics he recalls appearing notably on his exam included:

• Know Your Customer (KYC), especially its connection to anti-money-laundering prevention.
• Monetary and economic policy, which required interpreting the scenario in each question.
• Direct Treasury securities, including LTN, LFT, and Tesouro IPCA+.
• Supplementary pension plans, particularly PGBL and VGBL and their tax treatment.
• Decentralized finance and blockchain, as well as open-investment and data-sharing concepts.

His central lesson is to use practice questions to expose knowledge gaps, get clear explanations for mistakes, and return to the material consistently.

Speakers and sources featured

• Bruno Schandler — speaker describing his preparation and exam experience.
• Top Invest — practice-test and study-material website he used.
• ChatGPT — used to explain questions and concepts he got wrong.
• Professor Renan Duarte’s YouTube channel — supplementary source for selected videos.