The Shelf Above the Licenses.
On the Engine That Already Knows You.

Level I is 180 items across two 135-minute sessions. Level II is item sets. Level III adds constructed response, which is a genuinely different skill from anything below it — and the one where a written answer graded against a visible rubric beats another multiple-choice bank by the widest margin.

The Level I topic weights we build to

Ethical and professional standards 15–20% · quantitative methods 6–9% · economics 6–9% · financial statement analysis 11–14% · corporate issuers 6–9% · equity investments 11–14% · fixed income 11–14% · derivatives 5–8% · alternative investments 7–10% · portfolio management 8–12%. Ethics is the largest single band, and it is the one candidates most often treat as reading rather than as practice.

Roughly 97,000 candidates sat Level I across the 2025 windows, and the published pass rates for the three levels that year were in the forties. It is a long, expensive commitment, and the incumbent asks $1,099 to $1,499 for one level of it.

A hundred and seventy questions across six hours in two three-hour sessions, heavy on case scenarios. It is the exam this whole ladder points at for an advisor, and the 2024 blueprint reweighted it toward retirement and the psychology of financial planning.

The eight principal knowledge domains

Professional conduct and regulation 8% · general principles of financial planning 15% · risk management and insurance planning 11% · investment planning 17% · tax planning 14% · retirement savings and income planning 18% · estate planning 10% · psychology of financial planning 7%.

Alternative investments and risk management — the two credentials that most often sit alongside the CFA Program rather than instead of it. Both are two-part programs with published topic weights, and both are built here to those weights.

The FRM in particular is where the math matters most: value at risk, stress testing, credit and operational risk models. Every calculation in it is recomputed before you see it, for the same reason it is on every other page of this site — a wrong answer key in quantitative risk teaches you something worse than nothing.