Just realized I haven’t been to one except the awards ceremony. What about y’all? Do you go to the society events?
I can count on one hand how many I’ve gone to in over a decade, although I always have a nagging feeling that I should be attending more. It’s a combination of being too busy at work, and the fact that I feel that there are more convenient ways to get “insights.” I just never leave these events with that “eureka” moment; everybody’s firms’ compliance departments ensure that presenter prepared remarks are devoid of interesting or juicy tidbits. So you end up with the same watered down cr@p commentary and conclusions peddled by a million different shops. But this is endemic across any conference in the industry, not just CFA conferences, I should note.
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Have been to a few in NYC and one in FL. Similar takeaway as DoW; never left feeling like I learned much. The best ones were either very specific (e.g. litigation finance, infrastructure, etc…) or geared towards LPs (e.g. FO, pension, etc…). CFAINYC tries to make the latter events quite hard to attend (e.g. need $1B AUM). Managed to attend a couple after a lot of wrangling since I work for a small allocator. Found it was GP (mostly small, startup funds), private banker, and vendor heavy (like what’s this payroll software guy doing there?). Still you do meet a few solid LPs to share ideas with so it can be worth it.
nah i should though. i didnt even go to the award ceremony. how was the ceremony.
Live in the DC area and have attended a few. They mostly suck imo and have newbs trying to get a job or older charterholders looking to be adored. Pretty low-value scene in DC, but we’re not a finance town – more built for attorneys and accountants.
I went to a handful pre-Covid but living in the South Bay, it is murder getting into downtown SF during a weekday. Definitely not worth the effort.
But since Covid I have gone to a bunch of Zoom meetings by my society and the main CFAI, and those have been much better than in person because much more accessable and lower opportunity cost if it’s not good, you just bail out.
The CAIA webinars have been overall better than the CFA ones since I joined CAIA.
Yeah. You wanna square up?
bro. i live in the southbay. gardena ca. bang bang skeet skeet. which gang you rep?
Different South Bay dawg. I’m in Silicon Valley, south of SF, not Torrance.
I went to one in DC - it was kind of dull. This was like 14 years ago.
You haven’t recovered yet?
haha exactly - the jokes were so dull it took a while to recover from that