you can definitely pass if you just finish the reading and do enough practice question and mocks. Most engineers are way smarter than people in the finance community in terms of their ability to understand and digest concepts.
A quick update to all of you. I just finished FRA from shweser, tried to solve the end book problems and was in shoc kwhen I found out that i had a very low retention. I understod everything while studying, but I almost dont remember 70% of it. I was shocked to get only 13 out of 24 problems right.
What do you think of the best way to guarantee retention?
I will be starting the 4th book of Shweser today. So far so good,
Repetition is best for retention. Re-do the questions, especially the ones you got wrong. Make your own flashcards and review them everyday.
Your chances of passing are fair. Chances of landing a job though are a different matter altogether.
I am also software engineer with Electronics background and appeared for Level1 in June. Because of the math background, I felt the stats and math very easy.
CFA curriculam is completely based on fundamental analysis and hence anybody who can underatand numbers can do well in finance.
I also hear people talking about engineering and finance as being two different fields, but if you look at the top jobs in finance is related to stats, quants and engineers. Especially algorithmic trading, HFT firms, and many hedge funds hire engineers with CFA certficate.
So, rock on!!
To update you all, I am almost done with my first reading of the material. Only fixed income and alternative investments are pending.
However, I am starting to feel more and more discouraged every day. I am kind of losing hope of what I am trying to achieve with gaining the CFA, specially since everyone is telling me that it wont open up any opportunites for me in finance.
If you guys have any advice for me, I would really appreciaite it.
I have an MEng in Civil Engineering and I can guarantee no one topic (so far) in the CFA curriculum is as difficult as some of the stuff in my degree.
Anyone who disagrees, read a fluid mechanics text book
The difficulty with CFA is not any one topic/problem its the volume of material you have to cover. So, your chances of passing are high my friend, you just have to study really hard like the rest of us. At level one for me it was ALL about practice problems…so hammer hundreds and hundreds of them - Q bank all the way at level 1
Re MBA instead of CFA google ‘cfa vs mba ft’ and have a read - interesting stuff.
PS: I have an MSc in Finance too, could you consider doing this in addition to CFA? Read Andrew Clare’s comments at the bottom of the above FT article.
Engie’s will be fine - I did psych undergrad ffs. Nothing in the CFA program is insurmountably hard on its own, it’s just the need to know a million things on the day of (and some are more complicated than others) that will get you.
That depends: what kind of engineer are you?