I’m thinking about studying for my level I after i finish my mba and policy program applications. My goal after school is to get into sovereignn debt/currency research at a major investment bank. Wondering if the CFA will be useful at all, or is it only helpful if you’re interested in fundamental equity research?
The topics covered in the CFA curriculum include:
Equity Analysis
Fixed Income Analysis
Economics
Quantitative Methods
Derivatives
Portfolio Management
Ethics
…CFA is not just for equity research.
Level 3 is more geared to Portfolio Management.
Econ, Quant, Fixed Income, Derivatives and Portfolio Management (esp Level 3 PM) will help a lot with this. It’s true that CFA stuff probably helps equity researchers more (particularly at L1 and L2), but it’s still pretty useful for non equity investors. And if you are doing macro suff, equity indexes may be an important part of your portfolio (though it is true that a lot of macro stuff ends up being about interest rates and commodity prices).
This is a minority view, but I think CFA is actually better for macro stuff than it is for equity research. The equity stuff is very wide of the mark IMO, but the macro stuff focusing on currency, hedging, swaps, interest rate derivatives, etc. would likely be useful to almost any macro investor.