Have you ever met anyone with a CFA you thought was dumb as rocks, like they seem to know nothing about business or investing in general even after getting the designation? Most of the people I meet in the industry are generally pro completing the CFA, however, i've met some people with CFA desginations that really have me questioing the intellegence of certain charterholders.
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Most charterholders are absolue cretins.
Not a charterholder (L2 passed, could probably easily become one but haven't). I don't feel like I'm any better off for it.
My 2c. The top analysts at my SS shop don’t have it and it doesn’t seem to be predictive of success/failure from what I’ve seen. Another associate on my team has it and still makes silly modeling errors occasionally. Don’t think doing credit swaps by hand or whatever has helped his industry/sector knowledge either.
but for my own curiosity when you say most of the people you meet are “pro” do you mean they have it or generally look at it favorably?
CFA is a marketing/work ethic certification. Most of the material is not actually incremental or useful.
Will I be getting it because I want to work 50 hours a week earning $500K at a LO? Yes. Will I hate every second of earning it? Also yes.
Will getting the CFA give you that much higher of a shot at landing that seat? I’m just having a hard time understanding why a long-only would pay that much just for a CFA; there’s so many stupids out there that it can’t be the only criteria for getting half a mil in comp a year.
Yea I know a few people who have it and are absolutely brain dead dumb as rocks and can't put together a good investment thesis. I also know some people who have it and are very intelligent and thoughtful.
A lot of it is marketing your brand, and it helps firms market their brand if staff hold the designation. For people with less than stellar backgrounds it also gives some comfort to say "oh well at least they were taught / went through most of the core foundational topics at some point".
Man I know one guy who has it and he verbatim was pitching Amazon as "well I think there's something there because they have the cloud segment and its growing a lot" - he said this a couple months ago. That was it, that was the whole thesis. He rants in circles and doesn't have a point about anything, ever
That Amazon thesis is better and will work out over time better than 99% of pitches out there
Lmao ya know you're kinda right, but you get what I'm saying
It's like that graph showing probability distribution of IQ with genius on the right and idiots on the left and both sides say "buy AMZN because they have AWS" while the fat part of the curve is "granular model with alt data on AWS instance start ups + ad buying budgets blah blah"
I don't know a single person under the age of 30 who has the CFA and was a genuinely impressive person. I know 2 people who got it and it meant so little they still had to go get MBAs to land interviews anywhere half decent.
I mean the material is difficult and very complex. You need to understand stuff like equity investment accounting, earnings quality, foreign currency translation, derivatives (equity and fixed income, black scholes, etc), CDs swaps, machine learning techniques, volatility skew and smile, fixed income yield curve analysis, etc. If you want to expand your education and enjoy learning and are dedicated, it’s a great experience and worth it.
I actually stopped after passing L2 because there was so much stupidity around the CFA. The materials were dumb and too many of the charterholders were too.
It works great as a replacement track for people who studied humanities and then later want to switch to finance. A GED for finance.
But nobody would ever ask a high school grad to get a GED. And thus I don’t feel anyone who is already well-versed in econ/finance with a few yrs of experience under their belt should be expected to get a CFA.
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