GIPS was toughest for me, too many stuff to memorize.
SWAP are easy points, always the same recipe, ALWAYS
This
Behavioral finance - Lots of grey areas.
Currency hedging…Price/base swapped for Foreign/Domestic with puts/calls and all this other shit just gets confusing. Under a timed exam…it’s gnarly. Currency deriviative stragegies.
FI Immunization: for being like 6-10 pages…sure as heck feels like tons of materials. I thought I knew it cold and yet would still learn something new from a topic test.
Butterfly derivatives I think
Alog trading strategies. Like 1 page of text and always felt like it was up in the air what the best one was.
Individual IPS calcs…burrrrr
I don’t find grey areas in behavioral. I find that we have an inclination to think that “bias” means “trader makes a bad trade” and that messes you up when you’re answering the questions.
All Swaps are–really–are Time Value problems. And the Swaps tested in CFA exams are not challenging. Go sit on a active manager fixed income desk and see what complicated swaps really look like in OTC markets.