FCFA study guide
FCFA · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
FCFA is a professional certification in finance and financial analysis. It is designed for candidates who want a structured, broad grounding in how financial information is prepared, analysed and used in decisions - typically early-career analysts, finance staff moving into analytical roles, and graduates building a credential before or alongside practice. The FCFA study guide has 9 sections and about 3,763 words.
01Financial Reporting and Analysis
The Financial Reporting and Analysis domain tests whether you can read a set of statements as evidence rather than as arithmetic: which recognition rules produced the numbers, how the three statements articulate, and how accounting choices distort the ratios you compute. Expect items on revenue and expense recognition, inventory and depreciation methods, deferred tax, and DuPont-style ratio work.
462 words, about 2 min02Quantitative Methods
Quantitative Methods supplies the toolkit the rest of the exam leans on: time value of money, descriptive statistics, probability distributions, sampling and hypothesis testing, and simple linear regression. Items are short and computational, so precision about conventions earns more than breadth of reading.
457 words, about 2 min03Economics
Economics on this exam splits into three blocks: microeconomics (elasticity, costs, market structure), macroeconomics (output, inflation, unemployment, policy), and currency markets (cross rates, forward pricing, parity conditions). Items usually ask you to apply a rule to a small scenario rather than recite theory.
423 words, about 2 min04Corporate Finance
Corporate Finance tests the decisions a financial manager makes: which projects to fund, how to finance them, how much to pay out, and how to manage short-term liquidity and governance. The exam favours NPV logic and WACC arithmetic, wrapped in short scenarios.
428 words, about 2 min05Equity Investments
Equity Investments covers how markets are organised, how indexes are constructed, what market efficiency implies, and how to value a share using discounted dividends or multiples. Items range from conceptual (weak vs semi-strong efficiency) to computational (Gordon growth, index levels).
387 words, about 2 min06Fixed Income
Fixed Income tests the pricing of bonds from their cash flows, the yield measures used to quote them, the interest-rate risk measures used to manage them, and the credit and structural features that change their behaviour. Expect pricing, duration and yield-curve items.
392 words, about 2 min07Derivatives
Derivatives tests the four building blocks: forwards, futures, options and swaps. You need to know what each obliges or entitles a party to do, how the payoff is computed, and the no-arbitrage relationships that link derivatives to the underlying.
406 words, about 2 min08Portfolio Management
Portfolio Management tests how risk and return combine, how diversification works, what the CAPM implies about expected returns, and how to judge a manager's performance against the right benchmark. Items mix conceptual questions about risk aversion with short calculations.
387 words, about 2 min09Ethics and Professional Standards
Ethics and Professional Standards tests judgement more than recall. Items describe a realistic pressure point, such as a gift from a broker, an allocation of a hot issue, or a performance record that is flattering rather than accurate, and ask which standard governs and what the professional must do.
421 words, about 2 min