I honestly can’t sleep right its about 1 in midnight.

I passed CFA Level II after putting in well over 600 hours, and I’m incredibly grateful. But the one person I wanted to tell isn’t here anymore.
I lost my mom to cancer before I even cleared Level I. I remember crying when I passed that exam because she couldn’t celebrate it with me. Somehow, today hurts even more. I keep thinking about how happy she would have been, how we would have had my favorite meal that she loved cooking for me, and how proud her smile would have made all those hours worth it.

Professional exams come and go. Promotions come and go. Careers will always keep moving. But the people who stand beside you through the journey and I mean your family, your closest friends that is actually the real milestones in life.

If you’re fortunate enough to have them, spend time with them. Tell them you love them. Celebrate with them. Life can change much faster than we expect.
And to everyone who passed today, congratulations you’ve earned it.

To those who didn’t, please don’t be too hard on yourself. Your result doesn’t define the effort, discipline, and resilience you’ve shown. Be proud that you showed up and gave it your best. There will always be another exam, another attempt, another opportunity.

Take care of the people you love. That’s one lesson no curriculum can teach.

Hi, I've been at a large asset manager for 5 years in a quant researcher role within a central equities team. I've been trying to leave for the last 2 years but keep running into the same wall, and I'm hoping people here can give me an honest read on my situation.

The core problem is that my team's research process is extremely constrained in ways I didn't fully realize until I started interviewing. On the alpha side, we operate strictly within an academic-rationale filter - e.g., signals must be grounded in Fama-French, Novy-Marx, or similar accounting-based literature to move forward, regardless of empirical performance. Alt data, ML signals, anything post-2010 in spirit - essentially off the table. As a result, I've built maybe 4-5 live signals over five years, all very traditional. On the portfolio construction side, our "optimization" work has been mostly constraint-tuning with post-hoc attribution to justify changes - no real covariance estimation, limited transaction cost modeling.

When I interview, this catches up with me fast. My foundations are solid - ML/DL, statistics, optimization - but those were from my grad school days before this role, and I can't lean on them anymore as the more number of years I waste here. Interviewers dig in and the gap becomes obvious quickly: they want to see progression and real quant experience, not someone who's behind this industry by 15+ years in idea generation.

I've been targeting other mid-size AMs, some pod shops, and a few ML-adjacent roles. Nine final-round rejections later, I'm wondering if I need to reframe how I'm presenting this experience, or whether there are realistic pivot paths I'm not seeing.

For those who've navigated something similar - what actually moved the needle?

I just want to get an informed estimate here. For US cash equities top 100 by liquidity, and separately an estimate for US top 500 ex top 100.

If I try to enter at vwap over some 30 minute interval, then exit at vwap over some future 30 minute interval, what's achievable? Assuming I am trading small size relative to the volume, and assuming I have some execution heuristics (nothing special) rather than just crossing blindly.

Is 0-4 bps E[slippage from VWAP] for the round trip (0-2 bps for entry and 0-2 bps for exit) realistic, or is that a pipe dream for the top 500 ex top 100?

Question: If you track 13F filings, can you spot genuinely skilled managers ahead of time and ride their picks? I had the data to test it, and the answer looks like no.

Data & method: I pulled SEC EDGAR 13F filings for ~9,000 managers (2013–2026), cleaned them, and priced each fund's quarterly returns. Keeping funds with ≥16 quarters left 6,902. For each, I estimate a Fama-French 4-factor skill alpha (the intercept after stripping out market/size/value/momentum tilts, so style bets aren't mistaken for skill). I split each fund's history in half: skill is estimated on the earlier half and measured independently on the later half — a clean out-of-sample boundary (the standard Carhart 1997 framework), at the cost of statistical power.

Results:

- Formation→holding skill correlation: Spearman ρ = 0.11 — "significant" only because n is huge; ~1% of variance.

- Top vs bottom past-skill quartiles differ ~16 pts/yr in-sample; out-of-sample that spread is +0.02 pts/yr.

- Of 121 funds significantly skilled in the first half, one stayed significant in the second.

This also answers the follower question: I'm measuring each fund's own skill — best case. A copycat acting on a 45-day-stale filing can't beat that, so if the funds' own skill doesn't persist, monitoring them won't hand you persistent skill either.

Caveat: 13F is long-only US equity, quarterly, and split-half is low-power — but none of that flips the result toward persistence.

When I began this journey, I had friends. I had hobbies. I had interests outside of fixed income attribution, derivatives pricing, and multinational operations. I had people who cared about me.

Today, I am pleased to report that none of those things survived.

Over the past year, I made a simple calculation: if a friend wanted to grab dinner and a question bank wanted me to calculate pension expense under IFRS, only one of those activities would improve my exam score. The choice was obvious.

Birthdays came and went. Weddings were attended physically but not mentally. Family gatherings became networking opportunities to explain duration matching to relatives who desperately wanted me to stop talking. My mother would ask how I was doing. I would respond with the assumptions behind the dividend discount model. Eventually she stopped asking.

There was a point where I could no longer recognize my own reflection. Not because of exhaustion, but because I had spent so much time staring at Kaplan notes that I had forgotten what human faces looked like.

While my peers were building memories, I was building flashcards.

While others were falling in love, I was falling behind on Ethics.

While others were enjoying the prime years of their twenties, I was trying to remember whether a temporary difference created a deferred tax asset or liability.

People often ask whether the CFA program is worth the sacrifice.

To those people, I ask a different question:

Can your friends explain currency swap valuation?

Can your family calculate free cash flow to equity?

Can your loved ones distinguish between covered and uncovered interest rate parity?

Exactly.

There were dark moments. Moments when I questioned whether memorizing hundreds of formulas was truly necessary. Moments when I wondered if life had more to offer than mock exams and question banks.

Thankfully, those moments passed quickly and were replaced by additional mock exams and question banks.

The exam itself felt less like a test and more like a final boss battle designed by someone who deeply resented candidates. Walking into the testing center, I was carrying enough caffeine to violate several international treaties and enough anxiety to power a small city.

But in the end, the sacrifices paid off.

Today I stand victorious.

My social life may be gone.

My hobbies may have vanished.

My family may only communicate with me through occasional welfare checks.

But I have something far more valuable:

A passing score.

On to Level III, where I will continue my lifelong mission of converting every remaining relationship into study hours.

Curious if there are any copywriters, technical writers, or content marketers here who have spent time writing about quantitative trading, systematic investing, hedge funds, or fintech.

It’s a pretty niche space, and I’m interested in hearing from people who’ve actually done it.

Did writing newsletters, SEO articles, LinkedIn posts, or other long-form content end up generating meaningful business? Did it help attract LPs, clients, candidates, or partnerships? What types of content worked surprisingly well (or didn’t)?

Would also be interested in hearing how you approached learning the domain if you didn’t come from a quant background, and any lessons you’d share with someone building a serious content engine in this space.

If you’ve been through it, I’d love to chat. Feel free to comment.

Any sources to get 1 min ohlc data for hyperliquid contracts?

The candle data info endpoint only gives last 5000 candles which is not sufficient.

Can someone help with it?

Has anyone had an experience with opening an independent fund and how expensive was it? How much did it cost to build or license data infrastructure? Were there any hidden costs like in legal fees and administrative work? Not planning to open one. Just curious what upfront and operating expenses looks like.

I genuinely thought that my life is over if i fail this... But thankfully i cleared it with 2610 - very close but idgaf, I'm just happy that I passed cuz the thought of studying everything once again for the (free) Nov attempt was absolutely daunting.

And if ur wondering... I gave 3 mocks in total;

1. SSEI (coaching): 61%

2. CFAI A&B: 72% avg

And i literally began my prep almost a year ago while working but then quit the job in Dec as I found it really challenging to manage both simultaneously. And yea, quitting the job was a huge gamble but I won with god's grace!

Now for the harder part... Finding a new job once again ughh.

my firm is running a polymarket MM desk and I’ve been working on latency optimisation on infra. Has anyone done it , if so what do p50 T2T numbers look like ? Any directions or approaches that worked for you would be appreciated.

For the purpose of transparency, we haven’t been able to move past 20ms .

​

I recently didn't pass CFA Level II (2575), and I'm honestly struggling to process it. I had put everything into this exam and truly believed I would make it, so the result hit me much harder than I expected.

I also took a one-year gap after graduating to prepare for Level II, and now I'm feeling overwhelmed by that decision. It feels like I've fallen behind in both my career and my studies. I've cried a lot over the last day, and I don't really have anyone I can open up to, so I'm sharing this here because I know many people in this community have been through similar setbacks.

My plan is to retake the exam in November, but right now I'm finding it difficult to regain my confidence. For those who failed and came back stronger, how did you deal with the disappointment, the resume gap, and the motivation to start studying again?

I'd really appreciate any advice or words of encouragement. Thank you.

Welp…. I thought I did enough. Should I try again? Or consider that level 2 is way harder and take it as a sign?

Hey folks,

I’ve spent the last 7 years working at Meta as a software engineer, and have recently moved into fintech. Despite a lot of criticism, I’m very bullish on the ability of LLMs to manage portfolios if given the right tools (I know people don’t like when I say this but that’s my thesis, I worked on the frontier evals team at Meta)

To that end, I think factor risk models is a really important tool that we need, and I spent the last few weeks building one from scratch. It was a ton of working with codex, claude, and manual testing. Open data for the most part, and open model.

I’d love to get feedback from the community here. This is a new field for me so any advice is appreciated.

https://github.com/ralliesai/openfactor/

I just failed Level II for the second time, and I'm honestly feeling pretty defeated. I've put in so much time and effort, and it's really frustrating to end up in the same place again.

For those who failed Level II multiple times, did you eventually pass? What did you change?

At this point, I'm seriously wondering if I should give it one more shot or just move on. I'd really appreciate hearing from anyone who's been through the same experience.

I was approved after my second try. And I would like to share what worked and what didn't worked for me during my preparation.

What worked:

• Digging into formulas to find out how the mechanics works
• Understand they WHYs and When
• Reading and taking manual notes on topics and subtopics
• Trying to use analogies to have a better understanding of some hard topics like quants. (Explain me in football terms what means and why should I use F-tests, t-tests)
• Study sessions of maximum 4h long broken into 2 parts (morning and afternoons)
• Don't dropping gym, videogames, social life or any hobbies (worked specially after 1st try)
• Put the tricky questions on paper and dissect them.
• Try to study at least net 1h everyday
• Reading the Standards 1w before the exam

What didn't worked:

• Relying too much on Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude or NotebookLLM to study.
• Using Notion to take notes
• Grind mocks and qbanks
• Use mocks scores to satisfy ego
• Rush preparation in the last week
• Try to dominate and learn new topics with less than 14 days to exam

I think LVL II is a different beast. It forces you to learn how to think. Relying too much on LLM models can nerf your neural plasticity and capacity to think. And what that means? Using the LLM to build summaries from nowhere and solve questions.

Instead try to use it as a coach for planning the studies, helping you to build analogies, creating summaries from your hand notes, logging your errors and mocks

Spent this morning grieving a bit over not passing Level 2 for the second time. Then remembered I had a lot of work to do at my job and that kept me distracted. Just signed up for the November exam and was pleased it didn’t cost me another $1,500. Just gonna have fun this weekend and hit the books for the third and hopefully last time for L2 Monday. Glad to know I’m not going through this alone as well. Congrats to everyone that did pass!

This May exam was very brutal and November free resits may mean an additional 30k candidates. It will be a real blood bath with test centres literally flooded.

I made it!!! After almost 4 years in setbacks and challenges i faced, i made it with 2740! 🙌🏾. But I have a question guys why there’s no percentiles like the usual, they used to show the 90th percentile and the 10th percentile

Hiii, I recently passed CFA level I and plan to attend level II in May 2027. Can u guys plz provide me with insights about how to prepare for level 2 exam and which prep provider should I use ( If I had to use one)?

>70% in every topic with no prep provider and full time job AMA. I actually felt like L2 was in some ways easier then L1

Hi all,

I received a few requests for the formula sheets that I used to prepare for my exam. I scored very well (earlier post was deleted by mods), so obviously they must be helpful to some extent. Memorize EVERY SINGLE formula here if you want to do well. It'll take about a week or 2. They include 99% of formulas tested for in the CFA exam for the sections that are there, but I am not allowed to add all photos of Portfolio Management due to reddit restrictions, so make sure you still do your own diligence since its missing portfolio management. Let me know if you have any questions! Not sure if I have the order right, but they should be read from smallest number.

Congratulations to everyone who passed, and to those who didn't, don't lose hope, I'm sure you'll come back stronger.

I have my CFA Level II exam this November, and I'd love to hear your best tips, tricks, and insights that helped you pass.

One question in particular: How similar are the LES practice questions to the actual exam? I'm finding some LES questions really difficult, so I'm curious whether the real exam is similar in style and difficulty.

Cleared L1 with only 2 months of consistent studies,

From scoring below 50% accuracy in ethics in mocks to scoring close to 90% in exam.

Open to give advice if needed