The thirteen regulated activities, Type 1 to Type 13

There is no such thing as a general securities licence in Hong Kong. The SFC licenses you for numbered activities, and the number is the unit of everything: your competence requirements, your capital requirement, your responsible officer coverage, and what you may lawfully do on Monday morning. Learn the thirteen and a surprising amount of the licensing syllabus falls into place behind them.

The full list

The pairings that make the list learnable

Thirteen items is above the comfortable limit for rote learning, so do not learn them as thirteen. Learn them as a small structure with a few outliers.

• Dealing and advising pair up. Types 1 and 4 are securities, dealing then advising. Types 2 and 5 are futures, dealing then advising. Same order, two asset classes.
• Type 3 is the odd one in the dealing group. Leveraged foreign exchange trading has no advising counterpart.
• Type 6 is corporate finance advice. It sits with the advising numbers and is the one that matters for sponsor work.
• Types 7, 8 and 9 are the service trio. Automated trading services, margin financing, asset management.
• Types 10 to 13 are the later additions. Credit ratings, two OTC derivative types, and depositary services.

Six of them carry almost every exam item you will see: 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 and 9. If your revision time is short, make those six automatic and treat the rest as recognition.

Why the numbers matter beyond the exam

Because they determine everything downstream. A corporation's minimum capital depends on which types it holds and whether it holds client assets. Responsible officer coverage is required for each type. The competence requirements, including which HKSI papers you must pass, depend on the type you are seeking. And the SFC's public register displays a firm's types on its face, which is how the market checks what a counterparty can do.

It is worth searching a firm you know on the SFC public register and reading its entry. Seeing 1, 4 and 9 listed against a name you recognise makes the abstraction concrete in about thirty seconds.

Boundaries the exam likes to test

Dealing against advising. Executing a client's order is dealing. Recommending what to buy is advising. A firm that does both needs both licences, and items are often built by describing one activity and offering the other's type number.

Asset management against advising. Type 9 is discretionary. If the client makes the decision and the firm recommends, that is advice. If the firm makes the decision under a mandate, that is asset management. The presence or absence of discretion is the whole test.

Margin financing against dealing. Lending a client money against securities is Type 8, a separate activity from executing their trades under Type 1.

How to learn this in one sitting

The opinion: this is the highest return-on-time table in the whole Paper 1 syllabus. Thirteen rows, no reasoning required, and the content feeds Topic 1, Topic 3 and Topic 4 simultaneously. Candidates who leave it until the final week are leaving the cheapest marks on the paper for last, and they usually run out of time.

Write the list from memory. Check it. Repeat tomorrow. Three days of that and it is permanent, which is more than can be said for most of what you will study for this exam.

The concession: the numbers alone will not tell you where the real boundaries fall in practice. Whether a particular arrangement amounts to dealing, or whether a piece of research is advice, is a question that occupies compliance officers and occasionally courts. Paper 1 tests the clean cases. Real life supplies the difficult ones, and no table resolves those.

For which types map to which career and which examinations you need, see SFC licence types explained and the Type 1 dealing in securities licence.