Do you think CFA charterholder should learn programming languages, if so what are the top five languages we should learn that will benefit the most in our career?
I think these are the most important, but what do I know since I have no industry experience.
VBA
SAS
R
Python
SQL
What do you think? Or programming languages are not vital skills, Excel and basic macro is enough?
I work with all of those languages except SAS (I sometimes use STATA instead but haven’t used it in a long time)
I use VBA and R the most, and SQL comes up often enough that it’s useful to know at least enough to extract data from databases (generally less important to create and populate databases, though it can come up).
Most fundamental analysts just need to know some VBA and SQL, but in these cases, the languages tend to be “nice to have” rather than “must have” qualifications. SQL is not that hard to pick up.
Quant people need to know more languages, but it depends on what kind of quant you do.
But isn’t SAS the most popular statistical programming language in the industry? R maybe the future.
What other programming languages do you think a quant should learn than the aforementioned?
for economists, yes SAS is used but not for quant jobs.
SAS is popular, but you know what makes it unpopular: The astronomical licensing fee schedule.
R on the other hand, is free. It’s robust enough that it’s very hard to compete with free, as long as you’re not doing something like High Frequency Trading.
Matlab also sits in the middle, fairly similar to R but paid. They have some nice integration with financial databases and packages, though.
Stata is also inexpensive compared to SAS.
VBA. If you need anything further hire someone to do it.
Well I’m hoping for the end of SAS as well, since I’m a big supporter of FOSS and I can get any software I want for free. *wink wink*
But let’s face it, SAS is the king of the industry at the moment, if employers prefer SAS over R for whatever reason, such as industry standard, or the perceived security and support that comes with proprietary software, then as an employee, obvious I will need to learn whatever the employers want me to use.
From an employee perspective, and if cost of getting the software is not an issue, at the moment, SAS > R, since our goal is to be as employable as possible, why would I care how much the company spends on SAS, lol, as long as I can learn it for free, than I should spend the time on learn the one that’s most popular.
You just gave your ethnicity away sit
Wai Yu Sei Dat?
there is no “programming language that CFAs need to know”
most asset management or equity research folks don’t need any hard core programming as most are not quants, or economists, or project EPS with some statistic model
at most, some VBA could help in excel if you have some really complicated revenue build (though if it gets to this point, you probably overdid it)
funny story, one guy came in to interview once and said he estimated EPS through some regression model. I said thank you for coming in
Am I wasting my time doing CFA if I want to be a quant in the future?
if your avatar is your real picture, you don’t need to do the CFA at all.
^ lol, so true
Sounds like you’ll fit in much better over at the Wilmott crowd. Maybe give that a try.
Best story of the day.
Why? (and I mean this with sincerity, why was that an auto ding? Wouldn’t some alternative predictive models be useful if not only for just a gut check when earnings are esitamted?)
I think Astrology is the preferred method in some shops. If you can’t say “my gut tells me that the growth will be off the charts” with full confidence and a straight face, you’re not a real analyst. 
bueller?
c++