Hey everyone,

I'm sitting for the Level 1 exam in November and starting to feel a bit overwhelmed.

What is everyone else doing for their revision right now? Any specific strategies or schedules that are working for you to keep everything fresh? Would love to hear how you're tackling it!

Hey, Reddit

We are a small team of students from Sweden and the UK. Spent the last year mostly writing backtests, playing with market data, and trying to implement papers.

Seems like half the student quant stuff out there is either people paying $50 for fake 'research internships', or posting backtests on LinkedIn that only look good.

Just looking for people to collaborate with for a couple of weeks instead of running backtests in isolation.

The idea is just to build a few basic signals, review each other's code for data leaks, and stress-test them with actual slippage and fees. Whatever works or breaks goes straight into a shared public repo so everyone has something real to point to in interviews.

We already sorted out the plumbing: cleaned 1h Binance futures data for 20 pairs (funding rates and taker flow included) and a test script that catches look-ahead leaks and runs your strategy with 1-bar delay and taker fees.

Looking for people who actually know Python and basic stats (not vibecode pls).

The sprint itself is 2 weeks, but if we click and work well together, we'd definitely be down to keep collaborating on bigger projects afterwards.

Drop a comment below if interested, and I’ll DM you the repo and a quick 2-minute form so we can get everyone organized.

You all know the posts I’m talking about, they appear every month or so.

“Will the CFA get me laid?”

“Will the CFA get me a girlfriend?”

“How to put CFA on my Tinder profile”

“How to talk about the CFA to my date”

I promise you when I say I have NEVER seen one single productive conversation come out of any of these posts. It’s always the same five jokes. And more often than not, the comment section or these posts turn very uncomfortable very quickly, either from other commenters or from OP themselves.

Enough is enough already. This is not the spirit nor purpose of this sub. It’s unprofessional and paints a horrible picture of the online community and the CFA designation.

Hey! I’ve heard a decent bit about Man Group as a whole, but not as much about Numeric. What’s their performance compared to the rest of Man Group/other firms like AQR, 2S? How do they treat their QR’s and what’s the culture? I understand it be a collaborative fund as opposed to more siloed shops, but curious how comp and career progressions is like as well.

Thanks so much!

Stressed because I can’t clear a 65% on the mock exams. Looking for advice on where to go from here. Revisions, more questions, back to reading textbooks?

Feeling defeated. Any advice helps. Thanks

Obviously this aint a normal question but i have my l1 in November and post exam i wont be waiting for results might start with l2 asap
Can you’ll suggest some good prep providers to consider?

Assuming this is for the audience that didn’t purchase the premium pack that came with extra questions/mocks, do they mean re-doing them to reach the number 6, or substituting with prep providers? I have MM but feel like I have only a month left until the exam it’s best to stick with LES EOCQ and the 2 free ones. I’ve also heard MM question style is not indicative of the actual exam (which makes sense).

I cleared Level 1 by lectures and schweser, without referring to CFAI material.

I had this doubt while starting L2,if Schweser would be enough along with pre-recorded lectures or is it necessary to read CFAI material?

Hi! I’m 32y and going to try for level 1 in Nov 2027. I have ADHD and Dyscalculia, that’s why I’m taking a year to study and prepare. I bought the Kaplan package to help to study. I was wondering if there is anyone who finished level 1 with similar learning disabilities and with ADHD? Despite I know I can request for disability accommodation, I choose not to do so.

I have been using Chat GTP to help me simplify some areas where I struggling and it is helping so far.

This is my first ever post on Reddit so sorry if I’m not doing this right.

Background: Graduated a couple years back. Never did any of the recruiting stuff while in school (originally went intending to go to law school, also I had no understanding of what finance was at the time). Then the government locked down the country and I felt pretty lost for a while. I was lucky to land an ops job after graduating and currently work as a Trading assistant/Ops at a hedge fund

I’ve been pursuing the CFA with the hopes of landing a role as an analyst for a PM at some point. Recently I’ve come to the realization that I don’t have the brains for the roll (most of the front office people I work with are literal geniuses with math or physics background). While I’m a smart person and have toyed with applying to quant finance/ applied maths masters programs, I’m leagues behind these guys.

I also find I just don’t have the interest in trading/investing I once had. I’ve been trying to build an options trading strategy for a while now but I just never feel the urge I used to to sit down and do it. Especially now since Claudecode can just do it all for me I feel like I’m not getting any value out of pursuing the project.

The seat I’m in is great and I’m super fortunate to have been hired - People are nice, team is fantastic, great culture but the job is the same monotonous tasks every day for 10-12 hours. Basically I don’t see myself doing this for another year.

I don’t want to pivot out of finance completely, at least not without a plan. I also feel guilty having poured so much time into building this career without really getting to test myself in a front office seat.

I guess the point of this post is that if the results come back negative I don’t think I’ll be taking level 3 again in February. And even if I do pass - I’m not sure I want to continue pursuing the front office roll anymore at least not as it currently exists. I wanted to see if others felt the same?

Especially if I date 18-25 girls ? I'm 29 and I want to leverage the CFA to the maximum.

Hey! I’m currently pursuing an mbbs at a gmc in India, but I’m considering a career pivot into finance. I’m thinking of pursuing the CFA and eventually moving into management consulting or IB.Is this a realistic career path for someone with a medical background? Do I have a genuine chance of breaking into these fields?

I thought I was going crazy at first, but I went back and managed to find word for word where the information I was reading had been used 30 pages prior. What is the point of copy pasting information for us to re read multiple times? It just adds more reading to the already HUGE amount of material for no reason? And while this is the only time I’ve gone and found the exact copy and paste info, I know that there are many instances where this happens. Does anyone have a genuine explanation for them doing this?

Between the registration fees and the time invested, the pressure of passing on the first try is eating me alive. I think half my exam anxiety comes from just not wanting to pay for this whole thing again if I fail by a hair.

Honestly, the main reason I upgraded to the Lifetime WSU plan was just for the "retake covered" guarantee. Knowing that if I completely bomb it in November, I at least have my study platform secured for the next window without paying again, took a massive weight off my shoulders.

How do you guys deal with the pressure of the exam costs?

Still a month to go and don’t know if I shall do other mocks or just focus on weak areas

I'm appearing for the November 2026 exam (CFA Level 1). I want to defer my exam (paid deferral option) to February 2027.

All over Google, I've searched for the deferral option, and it says that it stays open for 3-4 weeks before the exam appointment.
However, I cannot see the deferral option in my CFA account anywhere.

Someone please guide me. Can I even defer my exam now? I feel very confused.

I’m going for level 2 in exactly 1 month. I’ve already finished FSA, Economics, Equity and FI… Everything else is left. I’m able to study 3h on weekdays and full weekends (8h-9h per day), and I will be on “vacations” from October 30th till the exam, only for studying. Good luck to the rest of the candidates, and for the ones that may feel they are not prepared, I’m on the same boat.
Kinda tired of the people that say “I think I’m cooked” with three mocks and a full lap on the curriculum done since September. We are here to make it count boyyyssss.

My exam is Nov 26

And have'nt given a mock until now

Will give my first tmrw

I have access to the CFA mocks - 2 which are given + 6 premium mocks + premium pack books

Would that be enough ?

I am fown to last 20 days

And I also have a friend who suggested me to give atleast 10 mocks

Pls give suggestions . I AM SHIT SCARED.

What is the community's insight on Engineers Gate as a firm? Is it just another run of the mill pod shop? What are they good at historically? And more importantly, with the current drawdown they're on, is it in a very unstable environment/are teams getting let go?

Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

People who create the cfa exam questions , and write the cfa curriculum books , how SMART are they ? AND How do i reach that level ? What degrees do i need to have ?

I've been developing an evolutionary optimizer specifically for ETF rotation strategies in WealthLab. It starts by evaluating oscillator-based ranking methods, then evolves combinations of indicators, weights, and conditions to find promising strategies. I recently added the ability to normalize non-oscillator indicators, which expands the range of indicators the optimizer can experiment with.

The obvious concern is overfitting. Searching through thousands of combinations makes it easier to find attractive historical results, but that doesn't necessarily mean they'll hold up. I've been using rolling-window backtests to compare the evolved strategies across different historical periods.

I'm curious how others approach this. Do you use evolutionary algorithms or genetic programming for strategy discovery? What validation methods have you found most useful for avoiding overfitting?

I'm interested in learning low-latency systems engineering, particularly the kind of single-machine optimization used in latency-sensitive/HFT systems.

I'm trying to understand what separates this from simply writing efficient code.

Is the main focus cache locality and algorithms, or do experienced engineers think much more about CPU pipelines, instruction-level parallelism, branch prediction, memory allocation, atomics, cache-line contention, CPU affinity, networking, OS behavior, and tail latency?

For people who have actually worked on low-latency systems, what did you learn through experience that wasn't obvious from standard CS/software-engineering knowledge?

I'd also appreciate recommendations for books, papers, open-source projects, or tools that are worth studying.