Ron Quintero, CPA, CFA, CFE, CFP, CMA, CTP, CIRA, CDBV, ABV

I guess this is somewhat related. I am involved with a finance program at an university. We have a good number of graduate students applying. Some of them have like 3 or 4 masters, and working on another masters degree or a Ph. D.

I can understand if you are a beast in one field, and publishing often, it’s probably worth pursuing. But some of these degrees have no correlation. For example, some guy had a masters in applied math, economics, electrical engineering, and plant biology I think. I couldn’t figure out whether I should be envious or sympathetic.

This I can understand.

Mr. Quintero is probably already paying a couple thousand dollars a year in annual membership dues to put all of these acronyms after his name.

With the CAIA dues at $350/yr, the incremental prestige of this designation probably isn’t worth the incremental cost.

Verily so.

Another fine post from Wendy. She catches very interesting and useful points. I like it.

But… if we single out the CAIA based on incremental cost, that’s like saying the other designations he has are worth their incremental costs.

Good point Ohai. He should probably use NPV to rank them in this case. If any of the designations have unequal lives he can use an EAA approach or least common multiple of lives for comparison purposes.

school I got my phd from, many students got at least 2 masters from that school as well as a PhD. You needed to do courses as well as a dissertation for the PhD, and you could use those same courses to pick up masters degrees with no extra effort, and a lot of the courses were given jointly by 2 departments , eg applied math and math or physics and chemistry or applied math and econ and so on, so picking up a second masters was straightforward

Why are CAIA dues so extreme?

Because they want to make sure you actually work for a hedge fund if you join and aren’t just in Asia working in It and getting the qualification.

That’s clearly what happened in Mr. Quintero’s case.

No disrespect to Mr. Quintero’s fine qualifications, but he falls short of Ron Rudich:

http://www.go-iba.org/downloads/nominees/Govenors_2010/R_Rudich_2010.pdf

RONALD D. RUDICH, CPA/ABV/CFF, ABAR, MS, CVA, CBA, CM&AA, CMEA, SBA, BVAL No CFA = WEAK! And putting a masters into there is sad.

we’re focused on quantity here my friend, not quality. ron rudich dominates in terms of sheer volume of designations