The CFA Giving One An Extreme Belief In Their Own Convictions in a World That's Not Black and White The CFA provides charter-holders with a black and white version of the world while studying and then sends them off to work in a marketplace filled with shades of grey. The history of high finance is littered with the corpses of people who simply could not fathom that they could be wrong. Asset management, more than virtually any profession, is the domain of Black Swans and survivorship biases. There is ample evidence of finance professionals attributing good fortune to intelligence and not luck, and bad fortune to luck but never to a lack of intelligence. I realize that this may not sound like life and death to the average person, but these CFA holders become the portfolio managers that make the investment decisions for the entire system. This means your favorite university's endowment, your beloved charity's trust fund and of course, the retirement income of virtually everyone in America including you, your dear sweet Grandma and Beyonce. Telling people like this that they can solve finance and solve the markets is a critical mistake. There is no equation or unifying theory to finance no matter what people say. And introducing a whole bunch of people who have an unyielding belief in their own capacity to solve any problem is a dangerous thing when the problem at hand is unsolvable. However, an unsolvable problem with a massive paycheck is one of the few things that will always rope smart people in and this leads us to the final and potentially largest problem.... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lewis-krell/the-cfa-is-a-scam_b_7490348.html
CFA Institute To Add Computer Science To Exam Curriculum May 24 2017 | 9:25pm ET By Trevor Hunnicutt (Reuters) - Students of investing will need to start cramming for a new subject: computer science. As of 2019, the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) examination will add questions on artificial intelligence, automated investment services and mining unconventional sources of data, an official from the accrediting group that manages the finance credential said this week. The CFA accreditation is seen as the industry gold standard for everyone from wealth advisors to Wall Street analysts. http://www.finalternatives.com/node/35221?mc_cid=7ad912b2a7&mc_eid=081a37cbeb
CFA and other designations only confirm that you know the stuff in investments and finance. It is by no means a guarantee that charter holder will produce returns that beat S&P hands down year after year. Because it is a very tough exam so charter holders are given the first look when jobs are given in the field. Is CFA a scam? don't think so, it confirms the academic abilities of a person who is most likely going to be working in a heavy fundamental research environment, going through dozens of annual reports a day.
You quoted the only passable paragraph in the entire article. The rest of it is unfounded, or (like the paragraph above) generalizable to any alphabetic professional suffix. (Akin to saying, "All portfolio managers are mammals -- therefore, mammals *suck* at finance and will bring down Western Civilization." "HuffPost" scraped low on this one -- it should not have been published.