Any of you, option guys, is a Chartered Financial Analyst? For now it's just a neutral question, I'm not judging. Allright, I'm judging. Some people are exam taking machines. Quite good at memorizing miles wide and inch deep courses, regurgitating them for the exams then forgetting it all. Or in any case be unable to apply whatever technique they 'learned' to anything that's an inch different from the material they 'studied'. But perhaps you prove me different.
I generally cringe when I see alphabets/initials following someone's name, but I have looked the CFA materials over, and it's a (truly) fine program -- top notch in every respect , and I've seen a good deal of it. I would certainly rank it higher than all-but-the-best MBA programs. (My bona fides being a handful or two of MBA courses at two name-brand schools, which I slept through, but received "A" grades.) Were I shopping for employees, I'd certainly put the CFAs at the front. But no -- nobody's going to "prove" anything to you.
By "proof" I mean correlation =~ causation. Success stories like CFA was an epiphany, got me from nobody to supertrader.
That's like judging an engineer on how well (or whether) he tunes his car. Some CFAs *might* trade, but it's a whole lot more broad than that.
CFA is more about investment and portfolio analysis rather than trading as done in this forum. Options are not big part of CFA either.
Oh that's why my company pension fund did so poorly. It was basket of mutual funds created by a bunch of cfa and mba's. Funny (not) they make money regardless ...
(Okay, I'll bite.) You have not defined "so poorly" (a relative descriptor) in any context. Did they actually lose money, or are you just mad that they only made 22% (twice the historical average), compared to the 36% of your favorite tech slate? You have also failed to distinguish between those who operate the pension fund, those who make the choices of the pension fund, those (YOU) who make whatever personal choices are available to fund-holders, and those who defined and executed on the operating parameters of these mutual funds. From other posts, I know that you know the difference(s). I know. It's early on a Monday. NDX is up, RUT is punched down. Things is all a'skew. But that's little reason to cast aspersions on an entire cast of hard-working *and*smart* people.
More a great skeptic of "credentials" -- of *any* sort. Way too much regurgatory {!} "knowledge" passes for wisdom -- whether medicine, engineering, accounting, LAW (Oh my god.), Psych/Social/Human Services.... let alone the ALPHABET in finance: trading, risk management, "market technicians", blah blah blah. I know too many IDIOTS with initials after their names -- AND NO BRAINS. But -- long-story short -- I have looked into the CFA -- I would like to *pursue* a CFA after I retire (sweet irony there, eh.)..... And the CFA has held up. So, while no real stake in the game either way, there's enough intellectual honest there to put a burden on me to speak up. "Hey! I've looked: I think it's good. {real; substantive; whatever.}"