Most Difficult topic in Level I

Personally, I found Econ by far, followed by Ethics and FRA.

I think FRA is exceptionally hard if you have no experience of it. Luckily I do it for my job so had to learn it when I got my first role in banking. My dad is an accountant so he used to talk stuff through with me when we shared a lift to work, which helped.

I expect the “hardest” part will turn out to be whatever you are personally weakest at: for some Quants, for other FRA, etc.
I’m planning to just sit down and go through it, determine my weak spots, and go from there.

I’ve been in a completely different industry in a non-finance role for nearly 4 years so I’m curious to see what turns out to be like riding a bicycle and what I need to learn or relearn.

I think FRA is tricky for most candidates. I disliked it when I first started but I am slowly warming up to it. I almost like pension accounting. I bet I have to eat my words come level III -.-

@MattyJ I’ve heard that level III isn’t really related to the previous two levels but NO FRA…
WHAT!?

For me, Econ. Because I’ve never studied economics before. It’s very hard for me to understand what the hell’s going on in those graphs.

FRA is driving me so crazy :(…. and that too, to an extent that I feel like hitting my head to a wall or pulling my hairs 😐

I found Quants & Economics the toughest. But practicing quants over and over helped me a lot and eventually I got a hang of almost everything.

FRA. But this is highly dependent on your individual strengths and background though. Your education, work and general propensity towards certain topic areas will determine this..

Economics and FRA for me. I admit, I went through Econ once and didn’t do much additional studying on it until the last week. I dedicated most of my time to FRA, as it has a greater volume and a broad spectrum of topics.

None at all. You may get asked a pension related question (I.e. who has the shortest time horizon, the company with average age of workforce of 35, or average age of 59), but there is no direct FRA section.

http://www.cfainstitute.org/programs/cfaprogram/exams/Pages/exam_topic_area_weights.aspx

I found quants hard to go through, but PM and Economics were toughest for me at L1. I don’t think economics was explained particularly well. If I were you, with hindsight I would concentrate much more on PM than I did back at L1, if only because it’s a big part of L2 and a massive part of L3. If you can get the basics right it will make your life so much easier later on!

I think FRA is the hardest for me, quants was one of the easiest apart from the hypothesis test. It took me awhile to get concept. And for level 1, you should focus more on the first half of the quants as it is very important throughout the levels.

FRA is just to boring/hard for me. Almost every other topic was very doable in my opinion. Used the whole 3 hours in both sessions too.

I almost like pension accounting.

haha we gonna miss FRA… it’s not too bad once you get the idea, i find it less tricky than residual income in equity, it’s just the tedious stuff of different accounting treatment for IFRS vs US GAAP.

@sarah no FRA at level 3. Nada. Zip.