Practical analysis for investment professionals
26 March 2015

Poll: Which Challenges Do You Face Most Often in Your Professional Life?

Posted In: Investment Topics

We asked CFA Institute Financial NewsBrief readers about the professional challenges they face. Arguably, a major contributor to investment returns is the ability to understand information.

In an age in which the velocity of information is accelerating, not surprisingly, more than 61% of 672 respondents said that “information overwhelm” was their biggest professional challenge. IBM, for example, estimates that about 3 exabytes (3 billion gigabytes) of data are created every day.


Which of the following challenges do you face most often in your professional life?

Poll: Which Challenges Do You Face Most Often In Your Professional Life?


Almost one-third of respondents said that “managing stress” was most challenging. This result jibes with work done by the CFA Institute Research Foundation in the monograph “Fund Management: An Emotional Finance Perspective,” in which the authors state, “The pressure to perform and the feelings of anxiety and stress that most of our respondents have about that pressure is palpable.”

Perhaps encouragingly in this post-Great Recession environment, only a very small minority (about 6%) chose ethical dilemmas as a challenge.

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All posts are the opinion of the author. As such, they should not be construed as investment advice, nor do the opinions expressed necessarily reflect the views of CFA Institute or the author’s employer.

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About the Author(s)
Jason Voss, CFA

Jason Voss, CFA, tirelessly focuses on improving the ability of investors to better serve end clients. He is the author of the Foreword Reviews Business Book of the Year Finalist, The Intuitive Investor and the CEO of Active Investment Management (AIM) Consulting. Voss also sub-contracts for the well known firm, Focus Consulting Group. Previously, he was a portfolio manager at Davis Selected Advisers, L.P., where he co-managed the Davis Appreciation and Income Fund to noteworthy returns. Voss holds a BA in economics and an MBA in finance and accounting from the University of Colorado.

Ethics Statement

My statement of ethics is very simple, really: I treat others as I would like to be treated. In my opinion, all systems of ethics distill to this simple statement. If you believe I have deviated from this standard, I would love to hear from you: [email protected]

1 thought on “Poll: Which Challenges Do You Face Most Often in Your Professional Life?”

  1. Mustafa Ali says:

    Managing stress is a skill that people what i believe learn over the time when they get use to same situation again and again. Information overwhelming is such a big problem to tackle with and to tackle it with speed due to potential loss of opportunity as we say in finance arbitrage opportunity.

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