I absolutely fu**ing hate the CFA. Studying for Level 1 rn, but been in the AM industry for close to 2 years. I'm going through the Kaplan notes right now and thinking to myself how absolutely useless 80% of the material is. If we're talking about my day-to-day, then 95% is pretty useless. Why am I spending time learning about all these derivatives and present value of bond calculations when I spend 100% of my time on public equities? Nothing about this exam is helping me get better at my job. I am sinking a 100+ hours into something that so utterly pointless, and just exists as a designation that my firm can throw on the website as a nice 'pedigree.' Why the hell anyone even looks at this and would assume it makes me a competent investor over another guy, I have no idea. I could point to hundred of HF guys without the CFA who are doing quite well and hundreds of AM guys who are middling along.
The thing that really pisses me off is that my firm wants me to get this designation despite me BEING IN THE INDUSTRY. All power to you if you're not in the industry and trying to break in. CFA institute sent a stat saying that only ~16% of CFA candidates are actually analysts and the remainder are generally trying to break in. What is beyond me is why I am spending hundreds of hours on these dumbshit exams when I could literally be devoting this time to getting better at my job / do additional research. Literally everyone with the designation at my firm has straight admitted that the CFA didn't help them at all in their jobs, and yet expect that others get it. It's so absurdly nonsensical reasoning that I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry.
Anyway, I'm not even sure where I was going with this, just that that rant felt cathartic. If any of you monkeys with CFA designations can supply a real reason why the CFA is necessary for people who are already in the industry, I'd be curious to hear it (beyond something stupid like 'pedigree,' which really doesn't matter for shit as there are thousands of CFAs that suck at their research role)
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