Let’s say you have to make a breakdown of the curriculum in terms of difficulty and relative importance(according to its weightage I believe), what would be your ranking? P.S. I am trying to understand the priority for my final revisions.
It’s too subjective, based on your skills and experience. I study maths so Quant is easy but Econ is quite frustrating. If you have industry experience then maybe the readings on equity, fixed income, alt investments will be familiar to you already.
I would say Ethics is new to most candiates (no joke intended), as I find the requirements vs recommendations quite hard to guess. It’s also a whopping 15% of the exam.
Relative importance is easy: look at the topic weightings on CAF Institute’s website: http://www.cfainstitute.org/programs/cfaprogram/exams/Pages/exam_topic_area_weights.aspx
Difficulty is subjective: what one candidate finds difficult, another finds easy. Broadly, however, most candidates hate FRA and Econ above all others.
You cannot escape FRA and ethics, they are worth 35% together. QM ties itself nicely with FI, CF and Equity. Derivatives, AI and Econ are usually the odd ones out.