This is a really stupid question. There’s only one true and objective answer to the question.
Due to its far-reaching scope, rigorous examination requirement, and overall visibility to the industry, the CFP is far more challenging and rewarding than either of the other two.
The CPA has limited applicability, because it only focuses on financial reporting and taxation. Similarly, the CFA limits its scope to asset valuation and portfolio management, which is only useful to those with assets to value and portfolios to manage. The CFP, on the other hand, teaches valuable concepts to all individuals in all walks of life.
The CFP exam is a beast of an exam. It is six hours and 170 questions long, and only offered three times per year. There’s a mandatory 40-minute break, to help you restore your mental sanity after such a grueling exam. Moreover, the scope of the exam covers virtually all aspects of a person’s financial life.
The CPA and CFA exams, while similar in length, have such a narrow scope that you should be able to study for them in a mere fraction of the time that it takes to complete the CFP exam.
The CFP Board has also recently embarked on a $10m advertising campaign to increase its visibility to the general public. They even took out a 30-second Super Bowl ad, which shows their commitment to their profession and the public good. The CPA and CFA organizations have done very little, if any, to increase awareness, and as such, should be lightly regarded.
This is my completely true and unbiased opinion. If you want a real professional, go see a CFP. If they’re not a CFP pro, you just don’t know.
In reality though I’ve had the CFP for over 10 years, now in addition to the CFA. I work with an army of CAs and my takeaway is that CA has far more visibility from the client perspective. I’ve never had a client commend me on ether CFA or CFP. But they can’t wait to talk to the accountant.
Internally CFA carries the weight, however. Most CAs I know will readily admit the CFA is much more challenging and they see it as the better of the two. CFP is simply table stakes if you want to be in wealth management.
But mostly these designation are just to get in the door anyhow. Nothing beats experience. Also they are completely different specialities… so in many ways they’re not even comparable.
I took the cfa because they said it was the hardest. And I respect people who go hard. I later found out that the actuary exams were harder and now I am sad.
you could always try for a FSA / FCAS. i know some CFAs also have those designations. some advantages you already have:
exams FM and IFM have some overlapping material with the CFA program (e.g. time value of money calculations, forward/futures pricing, swaps, CAPM, black scholes, binomial pricing, etc), so they shouldnt be overly difficult for you. another good news: the CFA designation satisfies the VEE (valuation by education experience) requirement, so that is already out of the way. The exam PA requires strong knowledge of excel and R, but you already use those every day and can easily use them on your sleep. The real challenge may be STAM and LTAM because of the new material, which is exclusive to actuaries, though maybe there is some overlapping material there as well. the downside: the membership costs close to 700-800 usd per year, which is significantly more expensive than most other professional memberships.
seems like FRMs are forgotten in this thread. they are more knowledgeable than CFAs when it comes to volatility calculations. they can easily calculate complex stock payoffs, such as S(T)^.5 / Q(T), where S(T) and Q(T) is defined by some stochastic differential equations.
