I earned my CFA back in 91. Brings back a lot of bad memories. I use to travel and would always read those boring books on the plane. I didn’t pass level III the first time and had to go back and try again. Portfolio insurance was the big topic in 91, where you would limit your loses on the way down. How times have changed.
As for the designation, yeah more and more people are trying to get one. Similar to Ironman racingJ. But I can say it did help with my career advancement. Today, I probably use 1/100th of what I learned. Too many people are book smart and dumb as all hell in real life.
Good luck!
I’m finishing my CFA Level III in 6 weeks, or so I hope.
I have friends who took Level I right after finishing an MBA. It’s probably the smart thing to do, as Level I doesn’t cover anything too abstruse, and there’s some overlap with the MBA. Level II is new material for most people, so my advice would be to prepare, vigorously.
It would help a lot if you had professional finance experience, mostly because the accounting will be difficult to somebody who didn’t have to live it - I didn’t study much for Level I and it didn’t make much of a difference. Level II, different story altogether. But on Level I, things like deferred taxes I didn’t bother to study, and I still had time on the test to derive the usage correctly, mostly because I had seen it before in real life. In general, accounting is the heaviest piece in Level I, so you should make sure you know it if you want any chance of being in that 35% who pass.
I agree w/Summitt when he speaks about much of the test he uses. If you look at the NASD’s Series 7 about 50-55% of the test is on Options, which is pretty useless from my perspective. Only a small fraction of brokers/financial advisors (whatever you want to call them) trade Options. Most reps sell mutual finds, variable annuities, proabably trade a good number of stocks (depending on their book), & variable life.
I’m not even going to go into all the dumb rules & regs you have memorize for just one day…