I had this horrible nightmare the other night. I was being chased by a bunch of friends and family trying to get me to do the CPA. It was bad, really bad, gave me chills when I awoke.
Before I did the CFA, I thought about going back to school to get enough credits to sit for the CPA and become an accountant. After working for a big 4 doing valuation and working pretty closely with audit teams and the like, I’m so d**n glad I didn’t take that route. Gives me chills just thinking about it.
hahahaha! Accounting! can’t live with it! can’t live without it!
i’M TAKING THE SOMM EXAM!!! AFTER LEVEL 2…ITS EXACTLY WHAT I NEED 
HAHAHAHA!!!
Not saying you’re wrong, but Google does consider your search history in its rankings. If you were googling the sommelier test before your search, it is a stronger potential it comes up first. If you want a “virgin search,” you should clear your browser’s history and probably go into incognito mode. Just saying your search could be biased. : )
Yeah well not to rain on anyone’s parade but we all know more than a handful of CFA Charterholders with not such impressive intelligence levels. You need a minimum of it to be sure but in CFA, one can make up for just average intelligence with strict discipline and perseverance. These are good qualities beyond a doubt and getting the charter, I would think, is testament to one possessing an appreciable combination of these.
But if we define difficult as the level of raw IQ it takes to master the topic, I gotta think that a number of other exams come ahead. Just consider how people generally struggle with quant (especially in L2), whereas anyone who has studied some econometrics would attest the CFA quant material is 75% undergrad statistics and maybe 25% grad school level, and at a very introductory level at that. I’m pretty sure it’s the same for most areas. It is the CFA’s one-mile-wide nature that makes it difficult. Not the couple inches deep.
Yeah well, we’re talking about the hardest exam in the world to pass, not the exam with the hardest material, defacto your “analysis” is grossly off-topic. Oh yeah, and wait until you take level 3.
DISCLAIMER: I don’t think the CFA exams are the hardest in the world to pass. I do think they are up there though.
What is the best exam to measure IQ?
^An IQ test
slam dunk!
Thank you captain obvious!
i’m asking if there is a spefic IQ exam. or is an IQ exam standard worldwide?
That somm doc on netflix was super interesting. I could feel the stress though…no joke…lost sleep cause of it.
Then again, IQ is probably less important than “RQ”, rationality quotient. There was a good Credit Suisse report on this by Michael Mauboussin recently. I have trouble posting a link in this forum, but it’s freely available online and I recommend to google it.
I’ve often wondered how highly intelligent people could believe in the most irrational conspiracy theories, for example. I’ve increasingly found that whenever I’ve had an edge on other people at uni, at work or also at other things in life, it was mostly not due to IQ but due to RQ - better judgement. I far more often think “how can people be so irrational?” than “how can people be so stupid?”. And the good news is, rationality, as opposed to intelligence, can be learned.
For somebody who is not a finance major, CFA up to level 2 so far feels fairly shallow. I could see why employers would not give a rat’s a**e if their employees are CFA charterholders. On the other hand, it is scary that so many people in the finance industry do not possess the knowledge of an average CFA charterholder. Probably as long as they are quite good in their narrow specialty the employer is happy, even though the employees can never see past their cubicle.
Deep
Someone may have already mentoned this, but there is a documentary on Netflix about the Master Sommelier Exam. I’d highly recommend watching it.
The CPA is much easier than the CFA. Coming from a CPA.
You actually considered going from valuation to audit? lol
I’ve known a couple of CPAs who sat for, failed, and then quit the CFA program. To this day, I still haven’t heard of a CFA who sat and quit the CPA process. That’s why I will always say the CFA exams are harder than CPA exams.