College student here (incoming sophomore) with nothing planned for the rest of summer. Could someone give me the lowdown on which Series are useful for what career functional areas? Also, where I should find practice exam books / study guides? Passing one or two seems like a decent way to spend some time.
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you cant take any of the Finra series exams without being sponsored by a broker dealer etc, that i know of. End thread
Actually I'm pretty sure you can take the Series 65 without sponsorship, although it's not going to do you a whole lot of good unless you want to work in wealth management. Now if you DO want to work in wealth management, the 65 or 66 is almost as important nowadays as the 7.
Basically:
7 - allows you to run trades on commissions 6 - a trimmed down version of the Series 7. Only allows you to put clients in mutual funds and annuities--basically useless but used a lot by insurance salesmen (I'm assuming your career aspirations are higher) 63 - the state licencing exam...basically it's a lot of regulatory stuff that you'll learn about when you take the 7, basically you need it for your 7 to be effective 65 - the Registered Investment Adviser Exam. This WILL allow you to run trades, but you will be a fiduciary so the standards of conduct are higher, and you can only run it on a fee basis, not commission. So basically, useless for sales and trading, but becoming more important now for wealth management 66 - this exam is a combination of the 63 and 65.
86/87 - required for equity research. Passing Level 2 of the CFA Program will exempt you from the 86
That's about all of the ones that you need to worry about. The other exams are for supervisory principals and compliance officers (Series 28), or back office purposes.
79 for banking could be key. Not quite as tough as the 7.
isnt the series 3 for commodities? That should be #1 on your list :)
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