I don’t want to do the CFA anymore

What do you do for work? I’m on level 3 and it’s been a grueling few years…and I’m not even sure how much it’ll payoff. If you have zero interest in it, don’t do it.  Be upfront…do your colleagues have the cfa? If not, then they really don’t understand how much of a time commitment it is. Even if you are already in public equities, the experience outweighs the charter. If you are already scheduled to take it, I’d try to grind out the first level if you already committed to it. 

CFA is an utter waste of time past a level 1 pass. Spend that time enjoying life, networking, learning the required modeling for your coverage, reading research, traveling

tough choice to make - i know there are people that dont learn anything on the job which is why they choose to do it. It all depends on what you want and how you think this will help your career down the line. Talk to your colleagues and friends in the industry and then make a decision. 

New to the industry, but after speaking with several mentors and PMs, the consensus has been that spending 300+ hours doing fundamental research will teach you more about the job than spending 300+ hours studying for the CFA. My takeaway is that unless your firm requires it for promotion, do not do it. 

I have it....don't use it. Waste of time. 

Just took the CFA level one and thought it was helpful. Am in public equities so levels 2 and 3 will actually be helpful. If you’re not a public investor, asset management, and more on the sell-side it seems to be less important and gives a different set of skills.

Depends what you want to do long-term. The fields where CFA is absolutely critical are LO buy-side / sell-side research (equity and FI). Additionally, it's strongly preferred for investor relations roles at public companies, upstream endowment / pension fund investing. For other stuff in finance, it's looked upon favoralby but not a must-have 

If you are not 100% committed to LO AM, then you don't need to worry about the CFA. If you are, then tough luck -- it's part of the job (some firms might be ok with a top MBA in lieu of that, but that's 200-250k in debt not including the foregone earnings and 2yrs of your life)

Lol if you hate it, don't. It's your life.

Could someone explain why the CFA is important for a career in buyside research other than tradition? If I've been working in research for 5 years at a well known shop, shouldn't that signal my competence at the job moreso than the CFA? I will do it if I have to to advance my career, but I'm wondering if it actually makes you better at the job or if it's just a requirement because of tradition/inertia

My PM is suggesting I take but I fully intend on being honest to the fact I have no plans of doing so lol 

It's really not that hard. And I think that's what it's really about. It's a signaling mechanism. So whenever I'm interviewing someone and they have a CFA, I know that they had the interest, focus, and follow through to get that done. If it was such a big deal for someone to get it done, then I would be concerned, this would be a red flag. But that doesn't mean I expect everyone to have it. Many people I work with who have PhDs or other academic credentials, or substantial work experience may choose not to do it, it might be too basic and they have other ways to establish that they are serious people. Alternatively they may be applying for jobs that don't require that kind of work ethic. 

But that's just me, I think are other people who think it's a waste of time and would prefer you spend your evenings and weekends learning new sectors and might hire you if you said you were going to do that instead.

I see some buy side firms specifically require CFA while others don't even mention it in their job postings. So it is hard to tell if the marginal benefits of having the designation justifies all the time and money that you will spend in preparing the exams.

DONT DO IT 

Very much worth it for me. Before CFA when I'd apply to random resume drops in AM I wouldn't get anything. Now with CFA I've gotten interviews everywhere

Literally feeling this rn. I killed my first L1 mock exam and now have no motivation and feel like I forgot half the stuff since I took it easy for a few weeks.

Chat GPT-4 just failed the exam, you better work up that will to finish. The robots aren't catching us yet!

Will second that it’s not that hard especially if you work in finance already. You can knock it all out in two years. I’d say my time would have been better spent learning to play golf better though.