I am an IT professional and I wanted to change my career line to finance/investment industry so I decided to get registered in CFA program and this year I have cleared all the three levels of CFA but I don’t have any working experience in this field.
Now I will appear for some job interviews but before that I want to revise my CFA concepts. So what is the easy and practical way to revise all these concepts in short period? What are the other resources to get practical knowledge regarding market or financial investments?
Well what kind of jobs are you going to be interviewing for? Different parts of the curriculum are obviously more and less relevant depending on what area of finance you are trying to enter.
It took me three years to clear all the levels as I had appeared for all the exams in June month.
I am looking for the research analyst profile and for interview preparation I have started following the market news and started revising equity & fra portion of level 1 &2 . Any other suggestions please?
the MOST important question to OP is what job do you have right now - IT means different to lot of different people. IT as in:
software developer
keyboard installer
tech guy who answers questions on things like “why is my computer bogging down?”
tech guy who installs/services servers and modems
Now if you are the first type of IT professional - software developer - then your door into front office finance is wide (bold word to use but I truly think so) open. Any active managers that focus on tech or specifically software tech would value your direct experience and expertise. Also note that a lot of active manager are moving or have moved into combo of traditional research and data analysis and automation using some kind of programming.
The reality is that majority of software developers do not make the transition into finance not because they can’t but because they don’t want to…Look at today’s pay rates (almost equal) and work-life balance (clear tech winner) and other perks offered (clear tech winner).
let me also add this which i have said in numerous other posts…equity research (assuming this is what you want hence CFA route) is 70% accounting:
* Reading and understanding 10K which is prepared by CFO of the company
* Pro forma financial modeling which is purely accounting hence we don’t learn about in 18 books of the CFA program
* You really need deep understanding of how companies treat certain accounts (footnotes) which is accounting knowledge
* Very familiar with GAAP
Now the “research” aspect is knowing about the company, risk factors, project feasibility, industry knowledge etc which come in handy if you worked directly in the industry.
You don’t need to know “what is P/E or what is unlevered CF vs FCFF” no…these things can be taught in 2 days and DCF is already built in excel…What you need to know is what I have listed above because no one is going to baby sit you to help you understand 200 page 10k and proxy statements and teach you pro forma accounting model…