Imagine drowning 900 hours towards a designation that represents having a minimally acceptable level of competence in a field, meanwhile 100s of those hours were spent on absolute garbage like this and everyone you share the designation with knows this too.
If you assign any significance to someone having or not having these letters, you’ve lost the plot.
| +26 | From Allocator to Public Investing | 17 | 5h |
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Level 3 kicked your ass huh?
I think the CFA might become even more valuable because of AI
Think that now everyone uses AI from students to professionals, so you can't differentiate between those that knows what's going on and those that don't, so the CFA will be a differentiator in those that know finance (valuable to keep/recruit) vs. AI wrappers / low judgement (useless).
After all, you can pass your degree relying on AI, you can rely on AI to do your job / do your models, you can rely on AI to prepare you for interviews (or even cheat), but you still need to sit for the CFA and actually study, so all else equal I'll take the CFA.
It's also a good differentiator in screening people that are committed to finance vs. someone that will just pass by / harder to understand their long-term goals.
This doesn’t make sense.
If you can rely on AI to do your job then the CFA doesn’t add any value.
You can’t rely on AI to do your job. You need enough know how to understand when AI has fed you slop.
The CFA does ask dumb 1 dumb question like the screenshot, but most of the test actually examines finance acumen, like the kind you need to understand when a finance AI has fed you slop.
Never thought about it that way
Counter argument is that CFA derives all of its growth now from EM countries (China and India and SE Asia) which are test-heavy cultures and are grinding through it thinking it'll give them a leg up (given 99% of recruiting is in-region, it won't because way more people will have it). Maybe it still retains some value in US as long as we don't import a lot of finance labor, and ends up with the dynamic you say
I also felt it was stupid waste of time when I studied for CFA (now a charterholder). Couldn't pay me to do it again, but actually am glad I have it if only because it was for some reason a factor in getting certain interviews. And as someone that never wanted to get an MBA, it's something that is looked at as MBA-equivalent given the intensity
That said, just like when I was in my college frat -- the current charterholders are overwhelmingly people that expect the next gen to do it because they suffered as 'pledges' too. Tbh even I have some of this tendency despite knowing about it. Truth is, when you waste ~500hrs of your life (cum. across 3 levels) you have a lot of residual pain to pass on I guess
Lot of word vomit there, but then again the CFA elicits complex feelings haha
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