Beyond study materials, there are a lot of things that inspire us or even motivate us to reach our goals or destinations. The case is very similar to when you are pursuing a high-stake global certification like CFA. As obtaining a CFA charter is a big deal as it involves challenging topics and concepts, good movies can trigger insights to better direct and help you understand the concepts and syllabus in a more creative way which is otherwise achievable by usual methods of reading study materials or classroom sessions! To make you think out of the box, here are some 5 ground-breaking inspirational movies that can help you through the CFA journey.

Margin Call

Margin Call is how an investment bank lays off its employees due to a financial crisis and how the risk manager warns his protege to stave off the challenge by pressing financial analysts to crunch numbers after the office is cleared off for the night. The deep lesson for CFAs in the movie is how to play with numbers even to ward off the worst crisis wave, and more specifically portrays that it is the niche of the accountants and risk managers.

The Pursuit of Happyness

The movie brings out the trail of perseverance and consistent efforts of a businessman in the face of a severe financial loss. The underlying idea of the movie is how the businessman optimized his talents and skills along with charisma to gain the trust of people in his brokerage firm. At the bottom, the movie shows that the road to happiness is never smooth and easy!! As CFAs need to face a lot of challenges in understanding financial concepts and ideas, they can stay lazy in working towards their CFA goals but need to take every pressure to reach their destination that would open up bright career opportunities in the future.

Boiler Room

The film brings to the limelight the shady side of investment firms and the finance world. Investment is crucial as part of future savings plans of every investor and the film brings to fore the illegal acts in the investment circle and how an investor firm did that did not exist but was believed to produce returns. The heart of the story is how innocent investors can be easily misled and be robbed of their hard-earned money. In a money-hungry world, the driving point here is you need to know about the firm before you invest. Diving into fraudulent activities can lead you to pay a big price and eventually ruin your career.

The Wolf of the Wall Street

The story brings to the spotlight how a passionate stock broker becomes a tycoon in the finance industry by meaning business leaving emotions out of the door! This means otherwise how to be dedicated and ambitious toward your goals. One of the big takeaways of the movie is how hard efforts can supersede talent and it is just a head start! As CFAs, when you invest your time and resources toward a particular goal, exams, professional or personal, you need to have patience and not haste or become too optimistic or even the other way around.

Barbarians at the Gate

This is a truly entertaining and informative movie that talks about leveraged buyouts, insider trading and business ethics for budding CFAs and other finance professionals as they tend to have dreams of becoming C-suite managers and executives in the future. One of the tests the movie is offering CFAs and finance professionals is to know what they are before becoming overly greedy for money. The underscoring message of the movie is when you fought all your life to reach your goal of becoming a CEO or CFO or any C-suite leader, you should know how to keep it!!