Thinking of working on the acturial exams (provided I pass L3), I’d love somebody with insight into both CFA and actuarial exams to discuss the process and difficulty between the two. I’d love to know if the actuary exams have an Analyst-forum type webpage. Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated. I poked around Beanactuary.org but it doesn’t appear to be have a lot of in-depth information.
www.actuarialoutpost.com - the actuarial version of AF
www.soa.org - official website for the Society of Actuaries
www.casact.org - official website for the Casualty Actuarial Society
Only take the exams if you really, really, really, really, really, really want to become an actuary.
Thanks for your help. Any other insight outside of “only take the exams if you really, really, really, really want to become an actuary.” Is it harder than CFA material? How long does it take to study? Etc.
I am an FSA who took up the CFA exams after getting my fellowship. As my trajectory is pretty much the opposite of yours, my comments will be along the lines of how an actuary finds the CFA material. One word of caution though, I sat for CFA L3 a couple of weeks ago whereas I sat for my final actuarial exam close to a decade ago so I could be out of date with this but I think the general concepts should still be similar.
General comparisons between actuarial exams and CFA exams:
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CFA exam material is generally characterised as “mile wide inch deep”. Actuarial exam material is probably more along the lines of “foot wide foot deep”. So the actuary will probably clueless about things like financial statement analysis for non-insurance companies/pension funds, crafting an IPS for some rich guy, alternative investments (personally a topic I always scored <50% for) etc… However topics covered by the actuarial exams will be in much more detail so things like calculating the PV of cash flows with probabilities attached to each of the cash flows (think one of the L3 topics where you are given probability of the person dying each year and you are required to work out how much he needs), bootstrapping the spot rate curve from a par rate curve, valuing a bond by discounting its cash flows using the spot curve are second nature to an actuary.
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So regarding the quantitative topics, actuarial exam is waayyy more difficult hands down. Provided the material is still fresh in his mind, an actuary can ace L1 without too much difficulty.
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The quantitative aspects of L2 can also be mastered without too much difficulty, or at most a little refresher. It’s the non quantitative parts that an actuary would struggle with.
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As for L3, a large part is about managing the investment portfolio, i.e. the asset side of the balance sheet. Actuaries are traditionally mostly obsessed with the liability side of the balance sheet. However in recent years, actuaries are starting to take a healthy interest in the asset side as well. Think the asset side only management vs the liability related method in the reading on managing pension funds (actuaries refer to the latter as ALM - Asset Liability Management) so how actuaries are familiar with that depends on how involved they are in those matter at work, which can be pretty company specific.
So to summarise, if your exposure to the quantitative topics are solely through the CFA exams, you’ll need to really really beef it up to get pass the CFA L1 equivalents of the actuarial exams.
Salient points about the actuarial exams. I sat for the SOA exams (again with the caveat that this knowledge is a decade old). If you are wondering about the CAS, I’ll expand on that later:
Actuarial exams are informally divided into 3 stages (helpfully analogous to CFA L1,2,3):
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Preliminary exams - These are the quantitative heavy aspects so analogous to CFA L1. When I took them they were 100% MCQs.
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Associateship exams - These exams are less quantitative in nature and cover on a broad base all the practice areas of actuarial work (life, health, pensions, investments, finance, P&C). I view them as kind of analogous to CFA L2. When I took them they were a mixture of MCQs and written answers but to my knowledge the SOA has changed them to some kind of online course.
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Fellowship exams - For the SOA, this is where you pick the practice area you want to specialise in. Think of it as CFA L3 with 0% MCQ
As for the SOA/CAS split, historically CAS handled the exams for P&C with SOA doing everything else. This split is unique to US. Actuarial societies in other parts of the world that provide exams do not have this split.
Now you may be thinking:“Does this mean that I have to make a decision whether to go into P&C from day 1?” Well, 10 years ago when I started the exams, the answer was a definite NO as the preliminary exams were jointly administered by the SOA and CAS so you only need to make the decision when you start the associateship exams.
However, recently the SOA also decided to get into the P&C track too and, well, let’s just say that it was a decision that did not go down well with the CAS (and also a lot of the SOA members yours truly included) so I am not sure about the status of the preliminary exams now. I am afraid you’ll have to do your own research.
As for amount of studying, the general advice is 100 hours study per hour of exam but obviously this is just a guideline.
As for the million dollar question of which is harder? I am afraid I’ll have to be patriotic to my actuarial roots and say that the actuarial exams were harder 
about the exams… for ASA
P,FM,MFE,C are 3hr exams done at the local prometric centre.
MLC is a written exam.
VEE is CFA, so you’ve already done it.
FAP is e-learning
then APC is taking a plane ride…
Thank you for the most comprehensive advice I’ve gotten! I truly appreciate it.