And while I’m thinking about it - so CFAI doesn’t teach anything about risk-neutral valuation which means that you can’t get a decent framework on valuing derivatives even though you can reasonably talk about derivatives using words like “quadrillion dollars”. But if they did, you can give a really nice statement about the difference between forward prices and futures prices. The forward price - futures price = e^(rT)*Cov(interest rate, underlier) where covariance is calculated under risk-neutral measure, “interest rate” is [blah], girsanov, blah, blah..
It’s kind of interesting to me that the popularity of MFE programs and CFA seem to be growing in tandem except that MFE programs are fabulously more expensive. Why can’t we have a similar charter that covers this kind of stuff which seems so much more important than, for example, learning about pooled interest accounting which is now not generally legal.
It’s pretty amazing that there is such a mystique about this stuff that people are willing to take a year off work and pay $50,000 in tuition to learn something that is only mathematically more sophisticated than most CFA stuff but not especially more difficult.