CFA Selling Dreams
I work in the back office of a large bank in NYC and thought that I would take the CFA to try and advance my career to what I ultimately want to do which is an investing role. I am indifferent between HF or LO but the stock market is something I am very passionate about and unfortunately didn’t realize it when I was still in school.
I have been in my first role out of school for about a year and have been studying for level 1 which I am taking next month. Now that the exam is coming up I feel ready but skeptical that this will actually help with my career. There are over 160k charter holders according to CFAI and there is no way that all of them have good buyside seats. I have met several people in similar situations to mine and wanted to hear some thoughts on how useful it is for actually getting a job. Maybe it would have helped it I was an undergrad still but ultimately I think business school is my only shot at breaking into AM or HF careers.
I think this is pretty common knowledge at this point. If you want to move to front office go to MBA and work in IB. That’s the most certain pipeline. Think investing seats are hard to come by out of MBA unless you did analyst stint.
The CFA credential is a victim of its own success. There was a time in history maybe 15 years ago when it was at the height of its "prestige" and ability to advance a career. That created a ton of demand for the credential, so the CFAI expanded testing dates (and I think testing locations) and decreased the (inflation-adjusted) cost. It's not a "dime a dozen" credential yet, but it's about a dollar a dozen at this point. There was a time at its height where the CFA charter would replace a master's degree in its ability to advance a career, but I don't see that anymore.
Simple CFA history: it used to be a pretty easy exam process that few people pursued (1980s/1990s). In time, it gained notoriety and with it they made the exam much more difficult, and they coupled it with extremely limited exam dates--twice a year for L1, once a year for L2/3 (2000s/2010s) + the exam was quite expensive (several thousand dollars in the 2000s). My L1 exam year, the pass rate on that test was something like 35%. This made the credential really difficult to obtain, not just because of the exam difficulty but because of the logistics and cost. Now the exam appears to have been democratized: the cost (especially relative to inflation) is much cheaper (just $900) with many employers paying for it, the pass rates are up (not hugely but with clear statistical significance: 41% 10-year pass rate for L1, which I assume means recent pass rates in the mid-40s), and the exam dates and locations have expanded. This will necessarily--in time--make the credential less valuable.
To drop in some citation for your stats, my pass rates.
CFA L1 for February 2022: 36%
CFA L2 for November 2022: 44%
1) recent L1 pass rate is still near 35% as Sio mentioned above
2) offering additional locations and dates to take an exam shouldn't be considered as something that diminishes value of the certificate. it's still only twice a year. and yeah you can take it in Chicago instead of flying to NYC, but how is it bad for prestige/reputation of the designation
3) $900 is still a pretty big cost to take an exam. add to that Kaplan materials cost, which is another $1k or more. and every time you fail, you need to pay another $2k for registration and materials. but the main cost is the amount of time you need to spend on it.
overall, I'd say it's more difficult to pass CFA now than before because they continue adding material. like 20 years ago, they'd just ask you about WACC and FCF. now you're supposed to know detailed concepts of statistics, mathematics, econometrics, economics, basics of machine learning, etc. and that's what should determine the prestige of CFA designation and not wether you paid $2k for it or $900 and had to fly to NYC to take it.
I'm one of those people that has actually been tracking the time I put in, so I have a minimum baseline for how long it took me. L1 was 283.5 hours and L2 was 433 hours. Now, for context, I need to add that my exam prep is entirely based on CFA materials and does not include any third-party prep services - I'm running this the old-fashioned way. But I will note, even with all those hours put in, my results for both the L1 and the L2 have been within the margin of error which, to me, does mean that you can "optimize" to make the exam easier for you by having a third-party eliminate a bunch of the fluff (empty filler text, lack of formatting clarity, reference to formulas used in previous levels without spilling them out, and MUCH much more). Per my experience, you can do this without the 3rd party stuff, it's just that digesting the original materials will take more time (which those who are working & studying may not have).
Re: costs - they upped it recently, the initial cost is the biggest because you get that one-time enrollment fee. Do agree with the general comment that it is the time that is the true cost here.
Yeah it's just common knowledge at this point that the CFA sells dreams. I'd also personally add to that that the CFA sells an illusion - it blue pills you into thinking you're making solid/ tangible progress towards a good buyside seat by being a nerd and going home and studying for hours every day after work - when in reality, you're making very few progress (in terms of recruiting anyway. In terms of knowledge, I'd personally still argue you're making a fair amount). The thing you should be doing for lateralling is networking and building your real skillset. Not saying that they're mutually exclusive tho - you could 100% do both. So do both if you want to move to the buyside.
You should take ALL that into consideration when doing the CFA. If you still think it's a good bet, then the sky's the limit.
I also wanna push back against the common argument that '63% of charterholders don't even work in good buyside seats'. I talked to some Indian charterholders and I realized the reason why the employment stats for Charterholders are so weak is because many charterholders are in India and China or the other Asian countries which DO NOT EVEN HAVE high finance nor firms like Baupost or Blackstone. That severely bogs down the stats and paints a grim picture of charterholders for the HF roles you're vying for. A more comparable stat should be released
Interesting point about India & China
Cfa is still gold standard in india though along with CA( Indian version of cpa but like 50x harder)
The fact that the "please bring your passport" reminder poster at CFA test centers (at in NYC when I sat for it) shows a CHINESE passport validates your point.
Well my Bugotti is completely transparent. But I do have a CFA, and I'm pretty happy with with it. But I would say that while a CFA could in some ways help you move from the backoffice to the front, it's realistically more valuable for people that are already in the front office. Yes many back office folks want to move to the front office. Can taking three exams get you there? Come on, did you really think so? Does a PE make you an engineer? Or do they give PEs to people who have enough qualifications to maybe be an engineer if they dare to try? You want to move from back office to front, you need to do a couple things. First, you need to be great at your job. Second, you need to build relationships with people in the front office, and demonstrate competence to do those jobs. Third, you need to get lucky. But you can to a degree make your own luck, it often makes sense to promote a qualified and visible backoffice person rather than do a new hire when a position opens up.
I personally think cfa wasn’t a great use of my time. Went to non target for undergrad. Worked in investment banking for 5 years prior to attending a top 3 MBA program with the goal of transitioning to long only analyst role afterwards. I’m sure the cfa helped me do that but the MBA program and my work experience were much more important to making that transition. I wish I spent the time studying for the cfa learning a language, playing golf, etc. Nobody cares about the cfa at my shop (midsize asset management firm). Work experience was much more important to getting the seat.
If you do CFA for the education, instead of the charter, you’ll get some value out of it.
The mistake people make is they want the CFA to be a ticket into an exclusive world where only credentialed people can enter. And that world doesn’t exist. You’re not just competing with all the CFAs but also many people who went to top schools or landed jobs at household-name shops that carry more weight than a CFA does.
But most of all, you’re competing with people who know their shit. That’s your true competition. Some are credentialed, some aren’t, but this is the group that lands the job.
So focus on what the program can teach you and keep learning from there.
You (along with most others) have a “break into the role” mindset which sort of implies there’s some code to crack. There really isn’t. Especially in public investing which is more meritocratic than other professions given 24/7 performance measures. Nothing is a perfect meritocracy but for the most part, it’s about being able to deliver performance and that’s it. It’s not about which credential or “pipeline” you position yourself around.
I’m not going to say that people with better notches on their belt (especially junior roles in IB or PE) aren’t going to get a leg up all else equal.
But a big reason buy side roles are filled with target schools/backgrounds is that those are where many of the strongest candidates happen to be.
So all else is not equal. Average Harvard/GS kid is smarter & better prepared than average non-traditional. A non-traditional who is actually as smart & prepared as the Harvard kid has a pretty comparable chance. Sure there’s a leg up for the Harvard/GS kid but it’s a lot less than people think.
I don’t want to respond directly because I’m a little sick of the awkward debates. So I’m just going to say this on the top level of comments here.
Charterholders, including a few in the comments, love to slyly insinuate that the charter is quasi-required for active management roles, particularly at Fidelity and similar places. I’m just here to say I think that’s totally inaccurate and coming from a place of charterholders being promotional.
I’m sure big shops like Fidelity have lots of ancillary roles (i.e. not fundamental analysis) that have a high preference for the CFA.
I’ll go further to say that many people in fundamental roles picked up the CFA as a hedge in their early career.
But the idea that you need a CFA to get a fundamental analysis job, I don’t believe for a second. Thats’s just classic correlation error. I bet 90% of those people are right handed but you wouldn’t say you need to be right handed to get that job. They got the CFA because when you don’t know your career yet, why the hell not? I personally know several CFAs in fundamental roles who’d love that time back.
Focus on what you will learn from the CFA. The credential game really isn’t worth playing.
I've very recently met a dataroom sales rep and a W&I insurance broker with CFAs...make of that what you will but I'm gonna go out on a limb to say their current jobs were not what they were looking for when they attained those 3 letters.
I am in the exact same boat as you are. Taking level 1 in 3 weeks. Word of advice, don’t go on this forum if you are trying to figure out the worth of the CFA charter. WSO was pretty much created for and by investment bankers and many analysts unfortunately think that because they work 100 hour work weeks they should just be handed the best buyside jobs. After all, seeing someone who isn’t sacrificing their physical and mental health in ER or S&T get a top HF job over you is a tough pill to swallow. The CFA is no different to them. Most bankers don’t have it and as a result feel threatened by it. It’s why this forum created this huge circle jerk of “IB-PE-SM HF.” If you still don’t think its worth it, I implore you to look up the job descriptions of any ER or AM job and see how many say “CFA preferred”