CFA Level 1 Flashcards: Learn the Charter Requirements, Pass Rates and Core Finance Concepts

Open CFA Level 1 (deck code XG6210, 187 cards) on Flip It expecting present-value drills and you will be surprised: only the last 34 cards teach finance. The other 153 teach the charter — how you qualify, what each level contains, and which regulator in which country lets you skip which exam. That is genuinely useful knowledge, just not the knowledge the Level I exam tests. Read the deck as three blocks and it becomes one of the sharpest program-orientation decks available.

Eight cards from the deck

The three blocks, and what is in them

• Cards 1-30 — the credential itself: CFA Institute (formerly AIMR), the 1947 Financial Analysts Federation, the 1962 Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts, the first exam in 1963, grandfathered charter-holders, 200,000+ charter-holders growing 5.5% a year, four years to the charter, the top employers (UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Royal Bank of Canada, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley), the bachelor's-degree requirement, two-to-three reference letters, mandatory membership, and the 2021 record-low pass rates (25% in May, 22% in July).
• Cards 31-73 — the syllabus described, not tested: what Level I, II and III each emphasise, the annually updated Candidate Body of Knowledge, ethics across all levels, quantitative methods (hypothesis testing, multivariate regression, time-series, machine learning and big data), economics, IFRS vs. US GAAP and ratio analysis, corporate finance (capital budgeting, capital structure, dividend policy, M&A, governance), equity, fixed income, derivatives, alternatives.
• Cards 74-152 — 79 cards of global recognition: Australia's ASIC Tier 1 RG 146, Brazil's CVM and APIMEC, the Canadian Securities Administrators, Hong Kong's SFC, Israel's five-of-six exemption, Malaysia, Singapore's CMFAS modules 6 and 7, South Africa's FAIS categories, Spain's CAd, NASAA's Series 65 waiver, university waivers at Berkeley, Duke and Boston University, SOA VEE credits, PRMIA, CFP and CAIA — plus seven cards on the ICFAI trademark litigation.
• Cards 153-187 — the only finance glossary: CAPM, efficient frontier, time value of money, Black-Scholes, interest rate trees, yield spreads, swaps, forwards, futures, options, hedge funds, private equity, asset allocation, hedging, order execution, rate of return.

Two ways to study it

Keep one country and suspend the other 78 cards. The recognition block is reference material, not recall material — nobody needs Peru's SMV and Sri Lanka's SEC in the same session. Find the two or three cards covering your jurisdiction and your target employer, suspend the rest, and you have cut a 187-card deck to about 110 without losing anything you will be asked.

Turn the syllabus cards into a gap list. Cards like "What does Level II emphasize?" describe topics rather than test them. Answer each one, then write down which of those topics you could not actually explain — that list, not this deck, is your Level I study plan.

Also in this category: AWS Cloud Practitioner Study Guide, a certification deck with the same history-heavy tilt worth reading the same way.