What the Series 7 covers: the four job functions

The FINRA Series 7 (General Securities Representative) exam has 125 multiple choice items and gives you 3 hours and 45 minutes. The passing score is 72. What is actually on it is set out in FINRA's content outline, which groups the exam into four job functions.

The four functions and their item counts

The counts add up to the 125 items. This is from FINRA's Series 7 exam page.

The lopsided part

F3 is about 73% of the exam (91 of 125). Everything else together is 34 items. That single fact should shape your study plan: the bulk of your time belongs on investment information and recommendations.

FINRA describes the exam as assessing competency for activities including sales of corporate securities, municipal securities, investment company securities, variable annuities, direct participation programs, options and government securities. Those product areas are where F3's items live, together with the reasoning behind recommending them to customers.

What the smaller functions look like

F1 (9 items) is about finding business: the rules around communicating with prospects and the public.

F2 (11 items) is opening accounts: gathering customer information and understanding the customer's profile before anything is recommended.

F4 (14 items) is taking instructions and processing transactions, including confirmations.

Small counts are not a reason to skip them. Each item counts the same, and these are often the most learnable rules on the exam.

How to study to the weights

1. Put roughly three quarters of your time into products and recommendations, including the math: yields, tax-equivalent yields and options payoffs. The bond yield calculator lets you check your arithmetic.
2. Give the other three functions steady, shorter sessions rather than leaving them until the end.
3. Use spaced repetition for definitions and rules, and do worked math by hand.

Not the same as the SIE

The Series 7 is separate from the SIE, which FINRA lists as its corequisite. See Series 7 vs SIE for the comparison and options strategies, explained for one of the toughest topics. An Encodr Series 7 course is in the works; the coming-soon page has the exam facts, and you can browse all exam prep courses.