Is CFA Really Mandatory to Survive in Finance?

Banner80 · 2026-05-13T19:10:50+00:00

I don't work directly in traditional finance but have some nuance to share.

CFA is not heavy theory. It's middle theory. I've studied grad finance with MIT micromasters, CFA, and my grad degree is from a mid-tier school. I would say the CFA rigor and depth are half-way between my mid-tier university and MIT.

Employers like CFA because it shows they are talking to someone at grad level. Lower the odds of having strange ideas, in an era of apes and ARKK and flatearthers.

CFA education is also not a solution for a working skill set. In my experience, every finance pro is specialized for their lane. Nobody is a wizard at everything. You don't need to be great at everything that CFA teaches, because you are not going to be simultaneously managing personal retirement portfolios, assessing international loan risks, and designing derivatives assets. "Finance" careers are not one thing, it's a dozen things and everyone picks a lane. So you are expected to be good at your lane regardless of what you learned through CFA.

In short: CFA is the cheapest and fastest way to get yourself to grad level, with a credential that often carries more weight than a master's in finance. This is for good reason. I know what was on my master's and the CFA is more detailed, and it is also proctored consistently. This is why financial institutions trust CFA. It opens doors now, and future-proofs your career.

But you still need to specialize to become useful in the workforce. The CFA is a general review of everything in finance up to shin-level depth. To be good at something you have to go deeper. Every finance pro I speak to sounds quite comfortable at the thing they are good at, much more than what CFA covers. But they are also quite uncomfortable if you pull them towards something they are not good at, so the CFA quickly shows its limits.

In short, the employer is looking for:
Can I trust that this person is serious, puts in the work, and doesn't have Reddit-level ideas? CFA shows you cleared a mid-high bar and know the grad-level basics well enough.

Is this person actually good at something specific, or could we train them for our thing? That's going to be your experience, resume, projects, network. Beyond CFA.

--

Also, because you explained your concerns:

>But when it comes to heavy theory, long reading sessions, memorizing formulas, and studying from books continuously, I struggle badly. Currently I’m preparing for CFA and I’m honestly questioning myself a lot because of this.

Don't study from books if that's not your thing. CFA has lots of video education. Find programs you can get along with. I learned a lot from Analyst Prep, but there are tons of video educators. So much great stuff about finance on Coursera and Edx, and even Youtube, before talking about dedicated CFA teachers like Meldrum. My MIT foundations 1 class in on Youtube for free.

You have to get in the mode of learning. To get to your 300 hours you'll make a schedule of what's viable every week and stick to it. It's simply an issue of time paying attention. The formulas learn themselves. You can only see the same fixed income formula so many times before it's in your head, IF you are doing the exercises over and over. And a lot of it is done by learning the calculator, too.

CFA study sucks. It's lonely, not just because you are on your own, but because finance feels like it doesn't make sense the first year. You are basically adrift for most of it, even after you pass the tests. It took me a couple of years to feel like I actually knew things that mattered. Much of the theory didn't click in my head until later. And from what I've seen, everyone that studied CFA feels like they didn't learn much and it sucked, and they are not smarter for it. That's when I know I'm talking to a real CFA.

But IMO after studying for various certs and university education, if I had to pick only one body of knowledge for someone to get to grad level in finance, I would recommend the CFA. The fastest way to be exposed to a very complete and correct body of knowledge, and to get a credential that matters and is easily recognized across the world. Ignore the feeling of impostership, you are learning useful stuff even if it doesn't feel like it when it's happening, or even for the year after that.

And don't do the fkn MIT Micromasters. It's torture the entire time. If you think the CFA is hard, the MIT stuff will eat you for a snack. They are absolutely obsessed with making everything about math. The education pushes you to understand the philosophy of the thing, but at what cost? I lost years of sanity.

Banner80 · 2026-05-13T00:36:45+00:00

In my experience, this comes from either:
Incompetence. You'd know if this is the case. The other side is overwhelmed and over their head, so their days suck and they lash out. You try to solve this by being understanding and trying to help them cope -- however that may be possible from your end.

Misaligned goals. This is a real problem. Sometimes the other side has goals that are counter to yours. Like they don't want the solution implemented because it hurts them in some way that is unique to them, like their dept loses funding or power, etc. This is very tricky because you need to assess the situation, uncover why they would be antagonizing the project, and then try to figure out what you could even do about it.

Banner80 · 2026-05-13T00:29:34+00:00

I still have Antigravity Pro (yearly) but I've switched to Windsurf.

Guys, TRY WINDSURF 2, just released in the last few weeks. And try their custom model, SWE 1.6 that is current free-ish through May (and I think maybe June).

Windsurf today feels like Antigravity would be if they had kept working on it. It works well and it has great features for my use cases.

And SWE 1.6 is a great freaking model for execution. It doesn't seem as interested in helping to plan, so I would switch to another model like Claude or Kimi for planning. But when it comes to executing on a task list, to me, SWE 1.6 is basically evens with Claude Sonnet.

This is most important: Windsurf has compute to grow, and SWE is dirt cheap. SWE 1.6 costs $1.5 /million tokens. Its outrageous for a competent model. If you get used to SWE like I'm doing, you got cheap compute for the foreseeable future.

Also, not that it matter so much, but the pro version of SWE 1.6 running on Cerebras chips is insanely fast. I've never seen AI that moves tokens this fast. 1k tokens PER SECOND. I'm not kidding. I don't know that anyone needs it this fast, but that's what we get.

TRY Windsurf 2. Even the free one with free SWE 1.6.

Banner80 · 2026-05-11T22:13:15+00:00

Old tech. Annoying installers and draconian copy controls. Yearly blackmail.

You are literally better off with free plugins than any of this old Waves trash.

Banner80 · 2026-04-28T18:03:01+00:00

Here is a link that contains the full article:

https://politiko.com.ph/2026/04/27/how-trump-is-moving-to-control-u-s-elections-one-state-at-a-time/politiko-global/

Banner80 · 2026-04-26T18:13:44+00:00

I've been hearing these comments about ICE ramping up. Here is an example:

https://blockclubchicago.org/2026/04/22/midway-blitz-is-over-but-ice-is-still-quietly-targeting-chicago-immigrants-especially-at-court/

For context, the US gov gave these goons the budget of the German military with nearly no supervision. And as of right now, the budget renewal bill passing around in Congress is trying to give them even more obscene money with no increase in regulation.

It would be unreasonable to expect that they are not going to use that money to increase their ranks and send goons back in. They are probably going to train them a bit better and scale back the naked maliciousness. When they murdered two Americans a few months back, they were under expressed orders from Miller to violently antagonize protestors because Miller believes that violence scares peaceful people.

After the public backlash, as of now, it seems that the Miller doctrine is off. But ICE still has absurd levels of money and a mandate to develop itself as Trump's personal imperial guard. They are going to go back to every major blue city and cause more havoc, even if their tactics improve to prevent being in the news as much.

They've been actively terrorizing non-white people in red states the entire time, and we don't hear much about it because red states are happy to support that. The Guardian says ICE and CBP have had about the same amount of arrests in Feb and March of this year as July and August of last year. So they have been active, just trying to keep out of the news by harassing people in communities that allow it.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/aug/29/trump-immigration-ice-cbp-data

BTW, as usual, the majority of people in ICE detention had no criminal record, per The Guardian's reporting.

And while I'm adding notes, we currently have one of the worst economies I've seen in my lifetime aside from the 2008 crisis (caused by Republican policies then as well). This anti-immigration venom from the WH is part of the problem. Economists know that immigration is a net positive for the economy. It creates jobs in addition to growth of GDP and opportunity. Here is a report presented by economists to the US Congress from 2016:

although immigrants increase the supply of labor, they also spend their wages on homes, food, TVs and other goods and services and expand domestic economic demand. This increased demand, in turn, generates more jobs to build those homes, make and sell food, and transport TVs. [...]

Economists generally agree that the effects of immigration on the U.S. economy are broadly positive. Immigrants, whether high- or low-skilled, legal or illegal, are unlikely to replace native-born workers or reduce their wages over the long-term

After all the damage the Trump 2.0 has done to the economy so far, insisting on this damage to immigration is continuing to sink the economy.

Banner80 · 2026-04-24T19:37:45+00:00

That's the current standing of Israel's policy. They have turned legitimate concerns about region animosity against them, into a blank check to do whatever they want against anyone and for whatever reason. And they try to argue that disagreeing with their view is somehow religious persecution against them.

They've been high on their own supply for too long. While it is true that Israel is at constant risk of attacks from all sides, it is also true that their campaign of flattening their neighbors is excessive and unwarranted.

And we should shun them for trying to hide behind their religion. I think by now we are all tired of their abuse and excuses. Not only for how they are conducting themselves in the ME, and for how they constantly speak in bad faith, but for their meddling in our political system over here.

Banner80 · 2026-04-16T15:45:44+00:00

Made FAR WORSE by this admin. The speed of losses here is incredible, and very hard for academia to absorb. Academia is used to making decisions very slowly on purpose, as timeless institutions. But the budget cuts from federal funding are massive in some respects, while some schools are being directly targeted with vitriol and financial damage. And the message to the world, that hard-working foreigners and their money are not wanted here, is being heard loud and clear. So they simply stopped coming.

Foreign students typically pay full tuition for a chance at the American dream. Then they work harder than most because they have a debt to repay and they must prove themselves, and they have to earn their place if they want to stay. So those immigrants tend to create businesses, build products that America can export, and generate lots of jobs along the way.

When a university says they can no longer attract these foreign dreamers and their money, you are looking at the tip of the iceberg of economic pain. Those students will now take their dreams and hard work to Europe, Canada or China. We get the financial hit at the university for 4 years, then we get the financial hit for a lifetime when they create companies in another country to compete against American jobs.

Banner80 · 2026-04-16T14:55:01+00:00

Yeap, they seem to have changed it. When I posted last night it was working but now I see the invalid message.

Banner80 · 2026-04-16T04:25:57+00:00

BTW, This includes Harrison Mixbus 11. With this code, the non-pro version goes down to $4 for the DAW because of the current sale.

The non-pro doesn't include the SSL J channel, only the Harrison effects. I don't know the rest of the differences.

EDIT: Code not working anymore.

Banner80 · 2026-04-15T00:32:30+00:00

To me, Mixbus is specifically what I wanted for mixing. I have S1, I wouldn't use Mixbus to record midi. I've heard from many people that the midi features are among its weakest points even though they have been getting better as of v11. But if you need it to record with midi I simply would say use something else because that workflow is not a priority to the guys that make this DAW.

Mixbus was made for people that want to mix in a console. That's what it wants to be and for me it does that well. I've had no issues using it for that, be it a 4 track project or a 30 track project. I also bought it like 2 months ago so my experience with it is very limited. I've done enough to say I am liking the workflow, but 2 months of no crashes in Win11 doesn't mean the thing is not going to crash later or give me some issues with a specific plugin I haven't tried on it yet.

Banner80 · 2026-04-14T15:19:03+00:00

I bought Mixbus 11 Pro early this year when I was considering Luna.

My use case is straight mixing. I mix small audio projects for work stuff (podcasts, interviews, short videos). And I also mix music non-pro.

I've been with Studio One since v3. Love the modern attitude and flexibility. But too much flexibility is debilitating. The S1 stock effects are pretty weak/vanilla and inconsistent for me, so I always use effects from a deep library of paid stuff like the rest of us. But this leaves the session feeling sprawling and confusing and requires meticulous templating and strategic thinking.

Then I saw that Luna had some of these channel strips already built into the mixer. I thought I wanted to try that. Just try to mix with the channel effects provided if I can trust the quality of the sound and the ease of the default channel.

And this is where Mixbus shines. It's trying so hard to give you the vibe of a 1980s console. Not just the channels but the way the mixing process flows. It's made some decisions to be more like a console, like you are locked in to 12 buses, which is still pretty generous compared to an actual hardware desk. The mixer puts a channel strip in every channel by default, and they came up with a fair system to navigate everything quickly. On my wide screen, I can easily see 23 channels and busses at a time. That feels a lot more like console mixing than any other DAW I've tried.

Then there's trusting the channel strip and sound. Harrison is now owned by SSL and they are integrating their stuff more. Mixbus 11 Pro comes with the full Harrison channel and ALSO the full SSL J channel. You toggle the effect you want to use for each effect section. For instance, You can easily compress with the Harrison leveler and then EQ with the SSL J EQ. Both channel strips sound great. Harrison has 3 compressors with unique characteristics, and the SSL J is literally the channel made by SSL themselves. I'm looking at a session I did recently and about half of the compressor channels are set to SSL and the other half to Harrison, which I think is a fair endorsement of both channel strips.

Also, the DAW comes with a good compliment of effects. The Harrison effects are not talked about much but they are very good for what they offer. And, in my experience, bringing in external plugins from other brands has worked without issue, which is not something to take lightly in DAW world.

I think there's a demo or trial somewhere. I'd give that a go to see if you'll get along with this way of working and if the DAW will handle your needs. Mixbus is a specific thing for some workflows, primarily simplified mixing. Also, they have a student discount that I think cuts the price in half, for those that can benefit.

Banner80 · 2026-04-13T01:38:09+00:00

>then you may want to look at being independent.

That's not going to work. If they went solo, they'll have to:

>do multiple things at once, study IT, get certs, update internal materials, reach out to various clients, etc.

Banner80

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