Question about "Accounting" /FRA-stuff in job practice

Water Cooler Careers
#1

Hi lads!

I have a question concerning this whole FRA-stuff. I am a L2-candidate and recently not (yet!) working in the Financial Industry (but in a related, rather quantitatively oriented) job.

I wanted to ask those of you who are already working in the field and/or have several years of experience how much / to which degree / how often you use the things you learn in the FRA-sections.

E.g. how often do you adjust Financial Statements of LIFO-firms to FIFO? How much do you care about Pension Obligations? How much are you trying to un-fizzle the details of Financial Statements, e.g. of Multinational Firms?

What share of your work is dedicated to activities like this?

I’m seriously curious and looking forward to your replies and insights! Thank you!

#2

I’d assume ER analysts spend a boat load of time normalizing financial statements.

Probably the most useful section in all of the CFA program is FRA & Equities

#3

About Equities I agree. FRA … I don’t know, I just see limitations to it.

#4

Then I guess you have all the answers you need

#5

:smiley: I mean there are limitations to this. IMO there is too much “judgement” involved in this. Difficult to find an example right now …

OTOH I am asking myself why there are no computer programs to do this. A quick research on the weekend showed that most analysts use MS Excel for this.

Is there no software package were you can load, let’s say Income Statement and Balance Sheet of two (or more) firms the program homogenizes them for you to whatever standard you want.

Do you know if there is any software package for this? I just think e.g. translating Inventory from LIFO to FIFO is cumbersome by hand.

#6

If everything in the ER world was automated there would be no reason to have entry-level ER roles in the first place.

There are plenty of automated sources:

facset

calbench

capitaliq (although less integrated I believe)

tagnifi