Free CFA Level I practice questions, by topic
Ten free questions for every Level I topic, taken straight from the 1452-question CFAQuiz bank, each with the full explanation. No account, no card, no email.
Every question is mapped to a Learning Outcome Statement and checked before it is published. See how our questions are made and the study guides, including how many questions are on the exam.
Ethical and Professional Standards
Ethics is the heaviest topic on the Level I exam and the one candidates most often underestimate. The material is not hard to read. It is hard to apply. Questions are short cases where two answers look defensible, and the distinction usually turns on one specific Standard rather than on general good behaviour.
200 questions · 9 subtopics10 free →
Quantitative Methods
Quant carries a modest weight but an outsized influence, because the rest of the curriculum runs on it. Discounting shows up in equity and fixed income; distributions and hypothesis testing show up wherever a result has to be defended. Time spent here pays interest elsewhere.
166 questions · 9 subtopics10 free →
Economics
Economics rewards clear direction-of-effect reasoning far more than computation. Most questions ask what happens to something when something else moves, and the reliable candidates are the ones who can trace the chain in one pass rather than recall a conclusion.
142 questions · 6 subtopics10 free →
Financial Statement Analysis
FSA is where the exam checks whether you can read a company rather than recite a definition. The recurring demand is comparability: two firms report the same economics differently, and you have to say what the difference does to earnings, assets, and the ratios built on them.
193 questions · 10 subtopics10 free →
Corporate Issuers
Corporate Issuers is compact and highly examinable, because its concepts have clean right answers. Cost of capital in particular reappears throughout the curriculum, so an error here propagates into equity valuation and capital budgeting.
105 questions · 6 subtopics10 free →
Equity Investments
Equity splits into market mechanics and valuation. The mechanics half is detail-heavy and quick to score; the valuation half is where the marks are won, and it leans almost entirely on the discounting you learned in Quant.
168 questions · 8 subtopics10 free →
Fixed Income
Fixed Income is the most mechanical of the large topics, which makes it the most reliably scoreable. Almost everything follows from one relationship (price is the present value of promised cash flows), and the rest of the topic describes what happens when that relationship is disturbed.
155 questions · 8 subtopics10 free →
Derivatives
Derivatives has a small weight and a fearsome reputation, most of it undeserved at Level I. The exam wants the logic of no-arbitrage pricing and the shape of a payoff, not the heavy machinery that arrives at Level II.
96 questions · 5 subtopics10 free →
Alternative Investments
Alternatives is descriptive with a hard computational core: fees. Management and incentive fee arithmetic, hurdle rates, and high-water marks account for a large share of the questions, and they are entirely learnable.
105 questions · 5 subtopics10 free →
Portfolio Management
Portfolio Management is the topic that assembles the others. Its Level I job is the framework: how risk aggregates, what the CAPM claims and assumes, and how a client's circumstances become an investment policy statement.
122 questions · 6 subtopics10 free →