What's the hardest topic?

CFA Level II
#1

Now that most candidates have had chance to run through the syllabus, what’s the hardest? Been working my @rse off for about 2 months, I’d put it in this Following order with hardest first? 1. Ethics 2. Financial Reporting 3. Derivatives 4. Equities - for sheer volume 5. Alternative Investments 6. Quants 7. Fixed Income 8. Portfolio Management 9. Corp Finance 10. Economics - its just exchange rates?! I’m sure everyone has their own order…

#2

derivatives ex options

#3

wow, you are so ambitious. aiming for 100%. I think hardest are ethics and corporate governance. Maybe I am not an ethical person.

#4

Ethics, PM, SS7, Econ and Quant

#5

Yeah, I should really change my name to ‘Hoping just to pass’

#6

Derivatives, FSA, PM

#7

swaps valuation, pension accounting. rest are relatively manageable.

#8

PM.

#9

hands down PM.

#10

I’ve seen alot of people say Ethics. what am i missing here? seems like the majority of the material, we’ve learned at level 1, I understand the vignette style might make it more chanllenging, but it doesn’t seem that bad. but maybe I’m missing it, whats the catch?

#11

for me, memorizing all the little nuisances in FSA, along with swaps is what gets me.

#12

FI, PM and AI are hardest to me. Derivatives are not trivial but the only hard topic I found is swaption pricing and valuation. Easiest topics to me are Ethics, Econ and Quant. The remaining topic are kind of comparatively at the same level of difficulty. I think since FSA and Equity are the largest two topics on the exam, they have been pretty thoroughly studied and reviewed by various study notes. So it turns out they aren’t that bad. But for the remaining topics (particularly the smaller ones), they didn’t get as much coverage as the study notes and so they would seem harder.

#13

Worst to easiest for me: Derivatives Quant Fixed Income Portfolio Management Equity Alternative Investments (just haven’t spent much time on this yet) Economics Financial Reporting Corp Finance Ethics I think there’s clearly a relationship between how formula intensive a topic is and my rankings here…

#14

PM and Derivatives, im gonna hit em hard though the next 2 weeks

#15

SS7, equity and ethics for sure