If you include a designation that can be had in under 90 days after your name, can you be anything but a salesman? Please stop, it’s just making you look silly.
Hell, I’m reluctant to put CFA after my name.
Just had to deal with a tool that had five different designations after his. I asked about some of the letters and was told for one of the designations he had to take a one week course on structured settlements. I must be missing something…there has to be more to it. Wow. Maybe a regulatory requirement of some kind I hope? I took a three day course to get a keel boat certification. Pass rate 100%. Maybe I should include that? Useful for sure. Means some charter outfits will let me take their boat without a captain. And maybe that experience will make me a better asset manager…the new must have designation.
Not that I have anything against alphabet soup, but if what you are emphasizing about yourself is that some company in your past decided to overpay for you to be babysat during an “executive” program at Harvard, I just don’t have time for you.
Please share any letters I should not even ask about. Painful experience.
And when I’m signing letters, it usually depends on the audience. If it’s the IRS or another state agency, I usually put CPA.
I rarely have to deal with valuation or investment-type issues yet, but when I do, I usually put CPA and CFA, simply so that the other side knows that I at least have a textbook education on finance.
I also have CRPC, MSF, BSc, and CGMA that I could use. But they fall under the category of “completely worthless”.
Odd statement. I work with over 100 salespeople and most don’t have much other than the CIMA. Some that are retirement specialists have some weird designations I don’t know anything about. I’m not sure what kind of letters Investor Relations people at hedge funds have, but I doubt they put frivolous letters after their name.
All and all, it seems like you took a pop-shot at salespeople for no apparent reason. If you don’t like working with them, don’t take the meeting.
Remember too that a lot of these “designations” are really duplicates of each other. They’re either completely reciprocal or they require only incremental work.
EG - I’m a CPA and a CFA Charterholder. I could probably study for two hours each and get the AAMS, APWA, AWMA, CMFC, CRPC and CRPS designations through the College For Financial Planning. Then, I could study probably another week and pass the CFP exam, which would automatically qualify me for PFS and ChFC, since they have reciprocal agreements.
See? In just a couple of weeks worth of work, I could get another nine designations to put on my business card!
No pop-shot. Salespeople make the world go around, but also harm a lot of unsuspecting folks. I just would like them to introduce themselves as such. Your post illustrates my point though. Salespeople are always the ones with fluff behind their names. Why is that? Having an anchor store at least would be nice. You sound a little defensive for a Charterholder…What letters do you put behind your name?
See Greenie, in your line of work and with your credentials, you don’t need to deceive anybody. The guy down at Edward Jones actually presents himself as a financial expert , rather than a salesman, certainly doesn’t disclose his conflicts fo interests, and, surprisingly, doctors, lawyers, and teachers believe that he is giving them good information. Maybe because of all the letters after his name, I don’t know. Letters mean something in the client’s World. Scalping 5.5% for the privilege of putting your money in an overpriced shadow index fund is just about criminal.
Not defensive, it’s just you’ve made your disdain for salespeople known multiple times so I wonder why you bother working with them at all.
I only have two sets of letters I could use, CFA and MBA. I only use CFA. I’m not sure how my post illustrates your point though. The CIMA is pretty much an industry standard for mutual fund companies. For 90% of the sales force that’s the only designation they get and I’d say just about all of them use it. The CIMA has a pretty good reputation, so I don’t see why anyone would get offended by it.
And it makes sense that our retirement guys have specialized designations in their field. Putting the letters behind their name just tells the prospect/client that they’re a specialist. It’s meant to be informative and lend credibility to the salesperson.
As far as alphabet soup goes, portfolio managers are by far the worst. But, they’re advertising their fund, and, hence, themselves so they feel they have to put everything down to their preschool in their pitchbook.
Anyway, why are you so easily upset? Obviously you had no trouble unmasking this salesperson’s manipulative attempt to gain your trust, so what difference does it make? Tell your admin not to let him in the door and move on.
@Sweep - what’s your opinion on the CIMA? It seems to be a much lighter version of CFA. (No valuation or econ or statistics or accounting. Just straight portfolio management.)
While I don’t necessarily regret going the CFA route, I often wonder if I didn’t do a lot of unnecessary work for nothing. That is, I think that the CFA is designed for institutional money managers and analysts, and I highly doubt that I’ll ever do either job. I’m pretty sure that, at least for my purposes, CIMA or CFP would have been a better fit for what I want to do. But I’m extremely dubious about the rigor of either program.
This topic was discussed at a breakout session at a recent conference I was at. The session was for advisors looking to further their education or choose to specialize in a particular area. One advisor asked a question about how to use this newfound knowledge with his clients. The speaker…I forget where he was from, Nuveen maybe? - made a good point. Essentially, he said you’re not going to win clients just because you have designations or you know how to calculate MPT stats. No one ever picked a financial advisor because of a great chart they used in their presentation. People choose advisors based on whether or not they like him/her. That’s the number one thing people look for in an advisor.
So I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over people being taken advantage of because they got hypnotized by all the letters. It doesn’t appear to work.
Then why do sales people put these 'participation" stickers after their name? Definitely some hyponitizing going on. You said it yourself. Lends credibility. Some cases justified, most not.
On another topic, maybe we should make a new thread, anybody with thousands of posts probably has outed themselves by mosaic, unless they are really careful. Sounds like you’ve always been a sales guy. Are you really an active charterholder? All sorts of financial sales guys masquerading as MDs on doc forums. Are you one of those?
Honestly, if I’m in the Finance/Accounting world I shouldn’t have to look up letters have a financial professional to see what they mean - for instance some that Greeman mentioned… Caveat would be if it was some obscure designation that was required by the firm/industry no matter how small.
I guess it depends on the salesperson. Like I said, as far as institutional sales people go, I really haven’t run into anyone flaunting meaningless designations.
If you’re talking about the Ed Jones guy, I’d say the first clue is - he works at Ed Jones. Kind of funny though, if instead of salesperson you mean financial advisor…um, aren’t you an RIA? Hate to break it to you…there is very little difference between you and any other financial advisor, dipshit Ed Jones guy included.
In the comments, he also makes the distinction between the “pre-CFP” programs (such as the AAMS), which are supposed to be stepping stones TO the CFP, and the “post-CFP” programs, which should have more value-add and more rigor.
He also distinguishes between “adding letters” as opposed to “adding education”. CFP/ChFC/PFS is just adding letters with no real education. CFP/CPA/CFA is adding education. There’s a big difference.