Economics is an area I really have not focussed much on. I’ve been through all the notes on it and read the schweser. I am hoping to just learn a few core things like triangular Arbitrage and try wing it. Need to spend this last month hammering the core areas and supplementing the smaller sections.
Anyone else going light on other areas?
To be honest I don’t have great command over the last 2 chps of fra. So a bit worried over it and also i could not solve questions from these topic given on cfa website. Will give another shot to it.
IMO the difficulty of Level 2 is that you cannot afford to go light in any section. If you bomb 1 or 2 vingettes on sections you did not prepare for it could make it almost impossible for you to pass.
This has been my experience with taking mocks and I have gone back to re-reading the few deritative sections that I went light on.
Can we assume that if during the exam a topic area has only one item set (such as Portfolio) then given that sample size is small (only 6 question) failing that topic may have less weight on the overall exam? That is, can I fail portfolio 17% and pass the exam 70% on average?
Yup.
However, CFAI could penalize that 17% giving you an extra discount on your overall score.
Risky strategy, better choose strategy of 50-60 % coverage each topic and nail at least 2 of them with >70% than
completely underperform in any and nail all other. My opinion is based on reading results topics from prior examination from resulsts posters.
I also have opinion that average overall results does matter. If many other canididates underperform, chance is higher if you are solid. I would say that passing rate on AF forum is over 70 % on average.
It’s not a strategy, just an observation. Nobody aspires to score 17% in a topic 
And then all the ones you guess you have 33% change of getting right. Expected probability of guess x number of guesses and who knows, maybe you’ll win the lottery and pass with flying colours
The aggregate score is what matters, no? You could score 0% on 30% of the exam and score 100% on the other 70% and pass.
I don’t think a horrible strategy would be to not study quant, derivatives, PM… Those three section are, at most, 35% of the exam and at minimum, 15%. So, say you are unlucky, those three are max weight and you guess and score 33%. You now have a 33% on 35% of the exam. But, you studied the rest hard and score an 80% on the other 65% of the exam which results in 64% aggregate.
^ cya next year
How can they penalise you further just because you did bad in Econ, or Portfolio mgmt? I thought this only applies to Ethics?
What if you abosolutely killed FRA and Equities, both with 100% but getting 0% for econ, I think you still have a fairly good chance of passing.
I dropped the quant in my level2 exam , actually it worked and saved me some time on the exam day as I just choose B as my answer .