APMA study guide
APMA · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Accredited Portfolio Management Advisor℠ – APMA® is a professional designation offered by the College for Financial Planning®, a Kaplan Company, which describes itself as a provider of graduate-level financial planning education and lists the APMA® among its professional certification programs. The credential is aimed at financial professionals who build and manage client portfolios and want structured, practitioner-oriented training in portfolio management rather than a broad financial planning curriculum. Because the College's page does not publish an exam blueprint, the domain outline used on this site-portfolio management; investment policy and asset allocation; investment strategies and styles; and portfolio construction and performance evaluation-should be treated as a study framework, not an official weighting. Preparation is typically self-directed: work through the designation curriculum, then drill calculation-heavy topics such as risk-adjusted return measures, rebalancing mechanics, and benchmark attribution until you can explain each result, not just compute it. Topics on this exam: Portfolio Management, Investment Policy and Asset Allocation, Investment Strategies and Styles, and Portfolio Construction and Performance Evaluation. The APMA study guide has 4 sections and about 1,334 words.
01Portfolio Management: Risk, Return, and Diversification
Portfolio management begins with the risk–return trade-off. Candidates must be fluent in expected return as a probability-weighted average, variance and standard deviation as dispersion measures, covariance and correlation as co-movement measures, and the distinction between systematic (market, non-diversifiable) and unsystematic (firm-specific, diversifiable) risk.
349 words, about 2 min02Investment Policy and Asset Allocation
The investment policy statement (IPS) translates investor circumstances into governing rules. Master its components: return objective (required vs.
335 words, about 2 min03Investment Strategies and Styles
Style analysis classifies managers along value/growth and large/small dimensions (the style box). Understand active vs.
322 words, about 2 min04Portfolio Construction and Performance Evaluation
Construction combines asset selection and weighting under constraints. Know the efficient frontier, the capital market line, and the Sharpe ratio as the reward-to-total-risk measure.
328 words, about 2 min