Don’t waste your time or money on a CFA, unless you want a slow buy-side job or aim to become a financial advisor. The curriculum is out-of-date and in some parts wrong. It’s also missing the ‘tech’ in fin-tech. You are better off self-studying quantitative finance or learn about payments (stay away from asset allocation as this eventually leads to a high paying sales job as head of asset allocation).
Thanks for the advice - are there certain topics I can learn about or some way you think I can work on making my resume stand out in any way after acquiring those skills?
Nowadays RL and Gaussian processes are very popular on the trading side, as is applying attention-based NLP techniques for pattern recognition. If you are interested in stochastic calculus and convex strategies, John Hull's "Options, Futures and Other Derivatives" is a classic read. Another good book is Marcos Lopez de Prado's "Advances in Financial Machine Learning."
