Hey everyone,

I’m working on a small research project called FX Atlas, an ML-based macro bias framework for FX.

The goal is not to generate trade signals or buy/sell calls. I’m trying to structure macro context before discretionary FX swing-trade decisions.

The framework combines macro data, economic surprise data, market stress indicators, seasonality, relative currency factors and regime context into a model-based currency/pair bias view.

At the moment, I’m thinking about the problem in a few layers:

1. Currency bias

Model-based directional pressure for individual currencies.

1. Pair divergence

Combining two currency views into a relative FX pair view.

1. Factor decomposition

Breaking the bias down into macro groups such as growth, inflation, labor, rates, liquidity and risk.

1. Event impulse layer

Separating short-term macro release surprises from the longer-term structural bias.

1. Regime layer

Using unsupervised methods to classify broader market states and detect abnormal environments.

The main things I’m trying to be careful with are:

- data leakage from macro release dates / revisions

- walk-forward validation

- multiple-testing risk across many factors

- regime instability

- feature availability across currencies

- separating short-term event impulses from structural macro bias

- making the output useful without pretending it is a deterministic prediction

I’m not trying to promote it as a product here. I’m mainly looking for methodology criticism from people who have worked with financial time series, macro factors or regime models.

If you were building something like this, what would you be most skeptical of?

Would you prefer:

- separate models per currency

- a global multi-asset model

- hierarchical models by macro group

- regime-conditioned models

- or a simpler factor scoring system with stronger interpretability?

Any thoughts on validation design, leakage checks, feature selection, or regime clustering would be appreciated.

Research only, not financial advice. lol

Just passed my CFP exam and looking to give CFA level 1 a go. Passed pretty comfortably on the CFP and wanted to know the spread in difficulty. I understand the CFA is a different beast, just looking for honest opinions on those who’ve done both.

Also how would you say it’s helped you in WM/FA. Looking to broaden my knowledge especially around global financial discussions for HNW clients. Undergrad in Economics & Finance, graduated this June. Targeting November test using MM for prep.

So I am using machine learning for mid frequeny trading (duration of a few hours), I built a few models, amongst those, I have two best models, one performs well, in a directional regime, when there isn't a lot of reversion at mid day , or in case if the market is kind of directional. This model was trained on a higher duration and is best to be used to trade for longer durations. The second model i have is trained for lower durations, and is more trained for reversion type regimes, when the market swing in mid day, and keeping a position till end of day isn't very good. Now, different days would be different, we don't know what is the best. I was thinking about keeping some kind of ensemble or training a few models, at a duration in between these two, ofc I would get worse net results on that, but atleast, it would have a higher sharpe and lessser drawdowns.
Is there a better way ? or are there ways to detect in some way what would be better where even if not in the ideal way, but some way ? I can definitely use both models also, or see how the signals align or different combination strategies .

How do you estimate the capacity of an options based strategy, especially without level 2 data?

CFA Level I is most often the first time where new candidates come across concepts in a structured way. Looking back, what is one concept you wish you had understood better before beginning your CFA journey?

Was it:

• How the three financial statements connect?
• Time value of money and discounting?
• Probability and statistics?
• Bond yields, duration, and interest rates?
• Accounting adjustments and ratios?
• Basic economics and monetary policy?

Would be useful to hear what gave you the biggest learning curve and what resources helped you get through it. It could also help new candidates focus on building the right foundations before they begin.

We’re also hosting Chanakyaneeti 6.0, a free online global finance competition for undergraduate students, built around practical finance thinking. The top six participants will receive CFA scholarships through our partnership with the CFA Institute. If you know an undergraduate interested in finance, markets, or CFA, feel free to share it with them - Registration for Chanakyaneeti 6.0.

I’ve done 4 cfai exams (either am or pm) and gotten as follows: 76%, 86%, 72%, 72%. Also did an am and pm of bill Campbell and got 70% and 79%.

Plan is to do another 5 full/10 half exams between bc and mm, review my stack of 5-600 flashcards regularly, and do the cfai q bank (did schwesers book of questions and those in the written material of the schweser books already).

Thoughts are appreciated. I’d rather eat my own guts than do this exam again.

Hey guys, I'm Chartered Accountant currently working at a funded startup. I'm looking to pivot my career into teaching and looking for 2 students who want to study CA Intermediate advanced accounting. Though it will be free of cost, I require honest feedback and sincerity.

Hi everyone,
I’m 28 years old and I’m seriously considering a career as a Financial Analyst.
My current plan is to learn Excel, SQL, and Power BI, and also get a degree in finance to build a strong foundation.
I’d love to hear from people already working in the field.
What are the biggest downsides or challenges that people don’t usually talk about?
How is the salary progression? Is the compensation worth the effort?
What skills have been the most valuable in your career?
If you could start over, would you still choose this career?
Is there anything you wish you had known before getting into finance?
Any advice, resources, or personal experiences would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance!

Hi guys,

I'm starting my CFA Level 1 and planning to give my exam this November, if anyone is looking for study partners or if anyone has any learning suggestions on how I could complete the content timely considering being on a time constraint, would be really helpful, and if anyone has notes and could share would be really helpful!

Thanks xx

The scenario clearly states that AFTER 20X5 the perpetual growth will begin (i.e start of 20X6)

So I calculated terminal Value by going TV = FCFE(20X5) x (1 + 4%) / r - g

and then proceeded to discount this by 5 periods.

The memo is doing TV = FCFE(20X5) / r - g

and discounting by 4 periods

When I was doing this question I did notice that the 4% in 20X5 was the same as our perpetual growth and thought it was odd but I decided to trust my understanding of the ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

Is my understanding wrong?

Hey guys,
I’m entering my 2nd year of B.Com this August and I’m thinking of starting my CFA prep from next month. I’ll most likely be joining Aswini Bajaj’s classes as well.

I’m just confused about one thing when should I actually register for the CFA Level 1 exam?
Should I register now and prepare alongside it or should I study for a few months first and then register once I know how my preparation is going?
If anyone here started CFA during college what did you do? How many months did you prepare before the exam and which exam window did you choose?
Would really appreciate any advice.

Thanks!

I built a C++ library for linux kernel bypass networking such as Solarflare ef_vi, DPDK, Verbs(mlx5) and also AF_XDP. Solarflare ef_vi and DPDK are two of most commonly used kernel bypass techniques in HFT market making firms.

Using this library I measured the RTT latency using a loopback on Solarflare X2522-Plus(ef_vi + DPDK), ConnectX-4 Lx(DPDK + Verbs + AF_XDP) and Intel XXV710-DA2(DPDK + AF_XDP). The benchmarks were run for 24 hours with median all the way upto P99.999 and max.

Solarflare X2522-Plus produced a RTT median of 1.866us and a max of 3.307us with 45B frames over 24 hours. This was the best result. Comprehensive results are all documented in the repository.

Over this project I did come across numerous driver(and NIC) specific quirks and bugs. These are all documented too.

Solarflare X2522-Plus is quite fast due to a Tx trick known as cut-through programmed IO(CTPIO). But I found this to be fragile, it has three modes: fast, default and in-order. Fast mode produces the lowest median but has a measurable percentage of failed CTPIO known as CTPIO “fallbacks” or “poison”. The CPTIO fallbacks significantly hurt the tail latency(P99 - P99.999). The CPTIO poison frames can be measured via ethtool. I used the in-order CTPIO mode which gives marginally higher medium but a tight tail latency.

Another strange issue I found was the PTP subsystem in the Solarflare X2522-Plus. So the default sfc driver runs a in-kernel IEEE 1588 subsystem with a PTP hardware clock, a dedicated PTP channel and management controller firmware activity. I found this to be a problem as a noticeable number of interrupts were mounting in /proc/interrupts and the stock driver with ef_vi produced a max of 7.679us which seemed very high. Then I ran the same benchmark with DPDK which produced a max of 5.628us. DPDK unbinds the driver so the PTP subsystem does not work. Then I compiled out the PTP subsystem from the sfc driver and ran the 24 hour benchmark again and the max was reduced to only 3.307us.

There is a lot of more interesting stuff but I think the post is already getting long so I won’t mention any more. Everything is documented in the repository. It is also 100% open source with an Apache-2.0 license.

Hey everyone, looking for some honest advice from people who’ve been through this.

I just finished my freshman year at Arizona State University as a finance major with a 3.8 GPA. Long-term I’m interested in asset management and private equity. This summer I took an accelerated math course early and got an A+, and I just finished my Bloomberg Market Concepts (BMC) certification. I genuinely enjoy staying academically engaged and don’t mind putting in real hours — I just want to make sure I’m spending them on the right things.

I have roughly 30-40 days before I go back to school and I’m trying to figure out the best use of that time for my resume and career trajectory.

Two main questions:

** *1. Is getting the SIE exam done before sophomore year actually worth it for someone targeting asset management/PE? Or is it more of a broker-dealer credential that won’t move the needle for those paths?
* **2.What else would you recommend doing in a 4-5 week window that would genuinely help an incoming sophomore stand out — whether that’s certifications, projects, skills, or anything else? Doesn’t have to be finance-specific, just high-value.

I’m an early stage finance professional like I’m a trader in a broking firm I’ve cleared level 1 last year now I’m preparing for level 2 and learning financial modelling i post regularly on Linkedin and actively networking but not getting proper guidance so can anyone please guide on how should I balance level 2 with job 😭

The top 1 in competition got $14k in rewards alone

The Time Series Generation literature evaluates on discriminative scores: train a classifier, check if it can tell synth from real. That rewards over-smoothed, low-variance output; a generator can ace it while violating vol clustering, heavy tails, and leverage effect.

So we benchmarked 18 models (deep generators, econometric classics, replay baselines) on 7 tasks quants actually run: Cont stylized facts, W1/MMD/sig-MMD distances, martingale check, IV-smile repricing, VaR/ES backtesting (Kupiec, Christoffersen, Acerbi–Székely, Basel traffic light), and TSTR strategy-rank transfer. One frozen OOS panel (7 features, 200 paths, H=60), each task with a real-vs-real noise floor, Holm-corrected significance.

Results:

• TimeGAN: the most-cited model in the field, scores 0.000 ± 0.000 on VaR/ES backtesting. TimeVAE and KoVAE too. TimeVAE's TSTR ρ is negative (−0.30).
• A plain block bootstrap ranks 3rd of 18 overall. Most of the published literature is under it.
• Models built for financial structure clear the bar.
• On 3 of 7 tasks most of the field is at or beyond the noise floor, the boards say so explicitly rather than overselling a ranking.

Repo: https://github.com/sablier-ai/finbench (MIT / CC-BY). v1 covers one panel and one OOS window; open submissions land in the next edition.

Who we are: (Sablier AI) GenAI Startup building synthetic market data for quant research, so yes, our model is on our own board. We designed the protocol so that fact doesn't matter: frozen at a git tag, every model's outputs archived in the repo, python -m benchmark.run re-scores the whole board from scratch, external baselines run their published defaults, and the aggregate is published as-is.

If you're working on generative models for market data (or you think your GARCH variant can embarrass the deep learning field further) dm me. Outputs only (200×60×7), no code, no weights, scored under the same frozen protocol as everyone else.
The board is meant to be beaten, and the current one shouldn't be hard to improve on: 15 of 18 entries can't clear a bootstrap.

I have uploaded 3 pictures.
1 contains text from the official CFA book curriculum for ethics(pg#20)
2 is a end of chap MCQ present in the book(pg#30)
3 is its correct answer with explanation also present in the book(pg#32)

Is it just me or do you also think nowhere does the text instruct to prioritize raising it within the firm rather outside it with the words "possibly outside the firm". While reading the text I also wondered what implications this could have for confidentiality but I thought maybe we can share a scenario after anonymizing it. But then this MCQ has made me even more confused.

Quite confused between offline or online coaching for level 1 in may/august 2027 need some guidance in this regards ???

I just got it today and it is very helpful so far to identify weak spots. Maybe I’m overdoing it, but I’m making a comprehensive set of flashcards basically copying word-for-word.

Do you think this is a good use of time/energy? How else are others utilizing such a comprehensive tool?

I am a 19 yr old currently pursuing bcom hons(tpm) I am thinking of doing cfa now and (along with french) and then moving out of the country for masters

Should I do cfa? cause it costs a ton of money to give even one of the level exams

Any professional HFT out there have any insight on how PCAP data for CME futures compares between LSEG/Refinitiv/TRTH and DataBento? Trying to decide between the two providers for the last 2 years of historical L3/MBO for a new market making project. Mostly interested to know about the quality of the data and quality of timestamps at the data recording server.

We built Jaxfolio (https://github.com/bravant-oss/jaxfolio), a hardware-accelerated portfolio optimization library built natively on JAX.

Docs: https://bravant-oss.github.io/jaxfolio/

Github: https://github.com/bravant-oss/jaxfolio

Standard Python tools like SciPy or PyPortfolioOpt bottleneck during large-scale backtests or heavy Monte Carlo simulations due to Python overhead and CPU constraints. Jaxfolio fixes this by compiling optimization math directly to XLA for GPU/TPU execution.

More importantly, using JAX's vmap, you can vectorize the optimizer to compute thousands of rolling efficient frontiers simultaneously in a single batched operation without looping. Because the code is fully differentiable, you can also embed these optimizers directly into deep learning training loops.

The library currently supports Mean-Variance, Risk Parity, and Black-Litterman models, and is significantly faster than traditional CPU-bound solvers. I’d love for the community to try it out, critique the API, or test it against your own edge-case datasets. Accepting contributions.

This is an unpopular opinion, and in no way should be construed as a recommendation, but I passed all three levels without taking a single mock exam.

The problem I have with mocks is a candidate is essentially playing 'Battleship' with the entire curriculum.

• Level 1 curriculum: Thousands of potential concepts, 180 pegs.
• Level 2 curriculum: Thousands of potential concepts, 88 pegs.
• Level 3 curriculum: Thousands of potential concepts, no clear determination if you even won the game

To overcome the above, people end up taking multiple mocks. That's fine and I suppose that's what I would do in that scenario also, but in that case why fixate on the differential of scores across mock exams? Your score went up, maybe you are smarter, or maybe the second mock you took was easier or maybe you got lucky with the peg placement of that singular game of battleship. Your score went down, maybe you've forgotten some things, or maybe this mock was harder. I've noticed people are cognizant about the relative difficulty of mocks across different providers, but they aren't as confident that such a thing exists across mocks from the same provider. Why wouldn't it?

For my time, I'd rather carpet bomb the curriculum vs. a series of surgical strikes in the dark. EOCQs + Blue Box + Qbank hit all the concepts more comprehensively than a mock exam could. It's important to note for L2 and L3 I spent NINE months preparing for each. That definitely was a factor for me.

Mocks do have tremendous value from a metadata standpoint. They give you a much better feel for what questions will look like on an actual exam, they help with time management, they help with effectively picking out relevant info from vignettes, they help with structured responses, they randomize concepts, forcing you to mentally pivot from one question to the next. However, I maintain if you don't NEED that sort of help, then mocks should just be considered an extension of a Qbank. Don't dwell quite so much on the scores.

That last point is easy to say, but very hard to do. In fact, the main reason I avoided mocks is the potentially devastating impact taking one could have had on my confidence going into the real thing. I have seen it so. many. times. in this sub. Confidence shattered two days before the exam: good luck on the real thing! I know myself and I know I couldn't (completely) shake off something like that. If you can then you are much stronger than I.

I went into L2 and L3 confident to the point of delusion.

Anyway that's my take. I'm not advocating people skip mock exams, but if some people are considering it, I'm just trying to make you feel more comfortable about that as a potential choice. Good luck everyone.