You studied >300 hours for an exam in college? If not, GTFO.
I had 3rd year uni exams that absolutely relied on knowledge and study time built up over the previous 3 years - so yes, of course there was material that I had been exposed to and had been studying in one way or another for well over 300 hours by the time I sat the exam.
lol although it does sound logical but fails on many levels. Let’s see the CFA exams…I have said many times and will say it again:
Pass rates hover around 40% - meaning you only need to perform just above the midpoint (average) ie finish 40th place out of 100 people.
OR score ~70% and pass on an exam that has 3 multiple choice (of course level 3 AM is bullet pointed method)
The CFA exams require algebra math skills - nothing more nothing less.
Questions are FCFE vs FCFF or Indirect method questions some GIPS or CAPM questions…Make sure you know the pros and cons of doing LIFO vs FIFO hahahahaha
Takes ~300 hours to study because it takes around 200 hours just to read through that stuff and do problems at EOC. Big volume of not so difficult material. Again when overwhelemd, just remember that you only need to finish in the 40th place out of 100. You do that on your SAT well you’re headed for community college. But in the CFA world, you get to register for the next level.
^ Yep, and yet a CFA Charter is still an unreachable goal for many within finance sector. Maybe not the hardest exam but one should sacrifice a lot to reach this goal.
yawn not going to go back and forth about this… I’ll leave it at this - nobody is saying that any individual piece of material is rocket science… it’s the breadth of material on each exam and the way it’s tested that make it difficult (i.e. the process). And I’m not buying the whole “I studied freshman-junior year for my senior level college exams and that’s over 300 hours blah blah blah…” By that logic, include all finance related study hours before each of the 3 exams…
Using Infinity’s logic…every level has a 40% pass rate. And in order to register for the exam, you must first have a bachelor’s degree.
So we’re already starting with the top 25% of the population (the ones with the bachelor’s). Then (I’m assuming and taking some liberty here) that you can throw out 50% of them, because they have no real academic rigor (such as a major in Poetry Appreciation from Online State University). So there’s 12.5% of the population.
So .125 x .4 x .4 x .4 = .008, or 1 out of 125. So not exactly the Prometheus Society, but not exactly community college material either.
Here’s a real challenge for all the naysayers out there: name all the tests that you have taken. Then tell us how they fare compared to the CFA exam. (College final exams don’t count, and neither do “assessment” exams like the GMAT or SAT, because they don’t have a pass-fail element to them.)
I have taken the Series 7, the Series 66, the Series 31, the CPA exam, the PFS exam, the Texas Life and Health Insurance Agent exam, and the CRPC exam (which is a joke if there ever was one). All of them put together is less difficult than the CFA exam. I would rather take all seven of them again than take the CFA exam again.
(I suspect that most people who say “CFA exam ain’t that hard” have taken very few, if any, other exams in their professional life.)
Yes, I know where youre coming from. I too was in that wagon when taking the exam - great morale boost that I could possibly be the “1 out 125”
CFA is more of a marathon. Gotta keep on going and going and chug along. 6 books is crap ton of material to go over especially working full time in finance.
If CFA is really “that” tough and prestigious to the level of “1 out of 125” then the merit of becoming a charterholder is probably woefully compensated given by the latest CFAI survey: 30% work in reporting, accounting aka back office and another equally % in client facing aka financial advisor or investment manager role (mom and pop IRA rollers).
Either the Marketing Officer at CFAI is brilliant or the exam ain’t that tough (next door Joe can pass) or exam is tough but the investment mgmt industry doesn’t know about its full value.
Most SS and BS guys I’ve come across have it so not really sure what you’re talking about infinity.
I work for a HF in NYC. Very very few have CFA charters (I am the only in my office) in the hedge fund and private equity space. Sell side is hit or miss…obviously there are very few to none in the IB world but you see some CFA charters in the sell side equity research.
the hardest single exam was in a physics class where I was having trouble. The professor told me that theoretically I could not get an A even with a perfect score on the final. However, since no one had ever gotten a perfect score on one of his finals for this class he would give me an A if I could do it.
I put in about 200 hours in the last few weeks of the quarter and went from struggling to a perfect score in 25 minutes on a two hour final. The second highest score was 72%. The mean was just over 40%.
It was a really difficult exam. The TAs were taken aback. The professor giggled.
I will agree with you on it being less prevalent in private equity and IB, but there’s tons of charterholders as portfolio managers for large institutional investment firms and to an even larger extent in SS equity research. Honestly, I’m more surprised when I don’t see it than when I do.
cool story bro
It isn’t.
It is probably the most challenging in Finance (save PhD program to be a Quant. But who the hell wants to be a Quant anyway).
Most laughable are people that think the CPA is really hard. I have to put on my hardo hat and say, ‘Bruh, CFA is like taking the an exam 10x as hard as the CPA once a year for 3 years’
agree with ITA, its more than likely to find a person with cfa than not . prob not in IB/PE tho
Clearly subjective as to whether it is the hardest in the world, but click below to see lists and thoughts on the exam. I am not going to claim it is the hardest exam in the world, but for me (and most Charterholders I speak with) it was certainly the most difficult and arduous process I have ever gone though. Realize that if you felt it was easy you are in the minority and making statements that the ops question is stupid is just plain ridiculous:
you need to put the numbers in context… NYC has over 600,000 people working in the “financial services industry” and maybe ~10,000 in the city are CFA Charterholders… ( maybe add another 5k if you include surrounding areas NJ/LI/CT)…
Out of those 15k… only a small percentage are in any particular field… equity research is just a niche in the grand scheme of things.
++++ what % really are applying for jobs on any given day? its still rare
ALSO there are 700k CPAs in the United States… vs maybe 125k CFAs in the world…
point is… the exam still has value and people will continue to take it
700,000 CPAs in the US, and 1.2 million lawyers
Anyone ever watch the SOMM documentary about the Master Sommelier exam? This would HAVE to be the toughest exam in the world. There are only 236 in the world
I passed all three CFA exams first attempt. I’ve written society of actuarial exams on 5 occasions with 2 passes. I should put out the caveat that I was at different stages in my life, so while I probably had more time to devote to the SOA exams, I didn’t put in the required efffort.
With thaty said I personally found CFA exams easier. The material is not particularly difficult to grasp, there’s just a lot of it. There are more SOA exams with less material on each but the concepts are far more difficult.