Does CFA/CA help in becoming a better investor

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Originally posted by basant

Does CFA/CA actually help in becoming a better investor or does it just make
the mind more analytical and adaptable to the game of numbers. By trying to
study so much of risk day in and day out do CFAs actually become risk averse so
much so that they cannot get ahead of the Balance sheet? 

The biggest money is made (Pantaloon, Bharti,Titan etc)
not by looking at the balance sheet but by trying to assess the business model/
management? How does one go about in understanding how one business model would
perform better then the other.Is Buffett/Charlie the best read on this subject

Would it be suffice to say that business comes ahead of
the numbers and if so why is so much stress put on numbers. 

Having attended a few conf calls I see that most analysts
are focused on what the next quarter is going to be maybe to get their spread
sheets correct but even after changing estimates till Q3 they get it wrong for
the full year. My question is instead of trying to pinpoint as to how much a
company is under.over valued why don't we just try and be subjective that a
company is very much under valued or extremely over valued. What is the need
for putting targets and then revising it every three months?

While the query from BM wasn't addressed to me nor am I qualified to talk on
this subject, just wanted to start a new thread by posting Gurus' thoughts..

There’s a lot that isn’t wrong at business schools.
They do a lot of things right. But what
tends to be wrong at business schools is that not enough emphasis is placed on
what is a good business, what is a mediocre business and what is a bad business
and why.

Interestingly enough, when Buffett studied business under
Ben Graham at Columbia, you had a genius with the single
best student he ever had. And the one
thing they never discussed was the difference between a good business & a
bad business. It’s amazing the blindsides great institutions have,
including great educational institutions

---Charlie Munger 

My most surprising discovery: the overwhelming
importance in business of an unseen force that we might call "the institutional imperative." In business school, I was given no hint of the imperative's existence and I did not intuitively understand it when I entered the business world. I thought then that decent, intelligent, and experienced managers would automatically make rational business decisions. But I learned over time that isn't so. Instead, rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play. ---Warren Buffett (letter to shareholders '89)

Edited by kulman - 20/May/2008 at 10:27am