Did anyone notice that UpperMark as well as CAIA itself are based in Amherst Mass?
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Yeah, well one of the guys who started CAIA is an acquaintance of mine who works as an Econ professor at U Mass. It took him 7 tests to earn his CFA charter and then started CAIA. He now teaches CFA stuff too.
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Taleb is actually there as well. Not a full professor, but he’s listed as “Dean’s professor”. http://www.isenberg.umass.edu/alumni/cw/Winter_2006/faculty/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- “Dean’s Professor of Uncertainty Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s writing and research explore the underappreciated dynamics and influence of chance in markets, epistemology, and everyday life. He is the author of Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Random House 2005), which in two editions has printings of 240,000 copies in seventeen languages. Professor Taleb is also the author of Dynamic Hedging: Managing Vanilla and Exotic Options (John Wiley & Sons) and articles in the Journal of Behavioral Finance, Quantitative Finance (forthcoming), Literary Research/Recherche Littéraire, and other publications. Professor Taleb is the founder of Empirica LLC in Manhattan, which he describes as a research laboratory and financial products house that focuses on portfolio protection packages. He holds a Ph.D. degree in finance from the Université Paris-Dauphine and an MBA degree from the Wharton School of Business. He has been an adjunct professor at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and a visiting professor at the Université Paris-Dauphine. See p.22 for an extended profile of Professor Taleb.”
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Anyways, I think CAIA is a good idea (mostly for the knowledge) and that’s why I’m doing it. But it’s RIDICULOUSLY easy (maybe even easier than an MBA, lol!). I myself wouldn’t trust someone to make a better decision simply because they have CAIA after their name unless pass rates go significantly down to 15%-20% at least. Pass rates are a total JOKE!
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Let’s not forget that when the CFA first began, their pass rates were very high as well. The CFA was founded over 40 years ago. That’s quite a bit of a head start. The CAIA is not meant to compete with the CFA. In terms of pass rates, i think they will continue to go down in the future as more people become involved in the alternative investment management industry. One day, this whole notion of hedge funds and private equity funds being some sort of “exotic alternative investment class” will disappear and it will become a plain vanilla product and make room for new and other innovative financial products. They have to have a pretty high pass rate in the beginning stages of the designation to get their CAIA brand out there. Once it becomes popular, they will probably start making it more and more difficult. It wouldn’t make sense for them to make the exam very difficult in the beginning and fail everyone, because that would hurt their revenues and their goal of expanding around the globe. In due time, it wouldn’t surprise me if they even added a Level III to this exam. Considering that they only began 4 years ago and candidate statistics are doubling every year, they are on a decent path.
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beer2000 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Did anyone notice that UpperMark as well as CAIA > itself are based in Amherst Mass? No wonder people using Uppermark are doing so well. wink wink…
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@ tekara I completely agree, you have to factor in economics when it comes to the for-private part of managing a brand/designation/certification. @beer2000 So am I to understand that UpperMark is a better choice then Schweser for this reason?
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