Certificat AMF Study Tips: Domain-by-Domain Prep Strategies

Regulatory Framework & Market Organization (25%)

• Distinguish the AMF and ACPR's respective roles clearly — market conduct and investor protection versus prudential supervision of banks and insurers.
• Understand how EU-level frameworks fit alongside French national regulation, including ESMA's coordinating role and MiFID II's foundational influence on client protection rules.
• Learn market infrastructure concepts — regulated markets versus MTFs, the roles of central counterparties and central securities depositories in clearing and settlement.
• Review market abuse concepts (insider dealing, market manipulation) since these are concrete, well-defined regulatory prohibitions.

Financial Instruments & Products (30%)

• Organize your study by instrument category — equities, bonds, derivatives, collective investment vehicles — rather than memorizing isolated facts.
• Master bond fundamentals precisely: coupon, yield to maturity, and the inverse price/interest-rate relationship.
• Understand French fund structures specifically — SICAV versus FCP — and how they relate to the broader UCITS framework.
• Review key risk types (credit, liquidity, currency, market) and how each applies differently across instrument categories.

Portfolio Management & Investment Advice Fundamentals (20%)

• Learn the risk-return tradeoff and diversification as core organizing principles, since most portfolio construction content builds on these two ideas.
• Understand suitability and appropriateness assessment requirements precisely, including what distinguishes them from each other under MiFID II.
• Distinguish systematic from unsystematic risk, and understand why only unsystematic risk can be reduced through diversification.
• Review active versus passive management approaches and their respective cost and performance characteristics.

Ethics, Client Protection & Compliance (25%)

• Learn client categorization (retail, professional, eligible counterparty) and why it determines the level of regulatory protection a client receives.
• Master AML/CTF fundamentals — customer due diligence, enhanced due diligence, and suspicious transaction reporting to Tracfin — as concrete, testable regulatory obligations.
• Understand best execution and inducement rules as specific client protection requirements, not general ethical guidelines.
• Review conflicts of interest management requirements, a recurring theme across both the ethics domain and practical investment advice scenarios.

General Strategy: Connect Regulation to Practice

Because this exam blends technical financial knowledge with specific regulatory obligations, practice connecting the two — understanding not just what a financial instrument is, but what regulatory obligations apply when recommending it to a client.

Put These Tips Into Practice

Our AMF exam page has free practice quizzes broken out by domain, plus a full mock exam, to help you build and test your understanding — alongside official French-language AMF materials for the real exam.