The Market Technicians Association based in New York awards the charter.

Whether you thought of enrolling in the Chartered Market Technician program or saw your associates name card with the acronym CMT, you must have wondered what is the value of the Chartered Market Technician designation.

The Chartered Market Technician is a professional designation for practitioners of technical analysis.

To get the Chartered Market Technician designation, you have to:

• Pass three levels of assessment;
• Have three years of relevant experience; and
• Have a current CMT as your sponsor.

The value of the Chartered Market Technician has two aspects.

The first is its intrinsic value for developing your technical analysis skills. The second is its professional value that will help you to prove yourself in the industry.

Intrinsic Value of the Chartered Market Technician

Syllabus of the Charter Market Technician Program

The clear advantage of enrolling in the Charter Market Technician program is having a structured approach to learning technical analysis. The three levels of assessment covers definition, application and integration of technical analysis concepts.

According to the Market Technicians Associations website, the content areas of the assessment include:

• Theory and history
• Market indicators
• Construction
• Trend analysis
• Chart and pattern analysis
• Confirmation

• Cycles
• Selection and decision
• System testing and money management
• Ethics

The content areas are comprehensive and cover topics that a self-taught technical analyst might have overlooked.

The Market Technicians Association has carefully selected study materials for the three levels. Even if you are not a member of the association, the list of reading assignments and prescribed books is a useful guide to the vast array of technical analysis books out there.

Market Technician Association Membership

To join the Chartered Market Technician program, you must first join the Market Technicians Association. As a member, you will receive weekly technical analysis webcasts, access to a repository of technical information, and monthly publications on technical analysis. These are resources to keep you updated of the latest developments in the field of technical analysis.

Looking at the structured and comprehensive approach, it is clear that Market Technicians Association treats the field of technical analysis as a rigorous discipline. This attitude towards technical analysis is lacking in most academic institutions. For this reason, the intrinsic learning value of the Chartered Market Technician program is clear.

Professional Value of the Chartered Market Technician

Professional recognition of the CMT designation

The Chartered Market Technician program achieved a milestone in terms of its professional value when FINRA approved the exemption of Series 86 examination for applicants who have passed Levels 1 and 2 of the Chartered Market Technician program.

Series 86 is part of the Research Analyst Qualification Examination and anyone working as a research analyst for FINRA members must pass it. Hence, being exempted from Series 86 is valuable for aspiring research analysts and puts Chartered Market Technicians on par with Chartered Financial Analysts (who are also eligible for Series 86 exemptions).

Career opportunities for Chartered Market Technicians

Another indicator of the professional value of the Chartered Market Technician is the number and profile of jobs that need a Chartered Market Technician. We searched for jobs in USA that need or prefer a Chartered Market Technician on Indeed.com. and found only two jobs.

The fact that the Chartered Market Technician is on the radar of one of the largest mutual fund companies in the world and an European MNC is encouraging.

However, the lack of opportunities is hardly motivating for job applicants looking to leverage on their Chartered Market Technician designation.

(Update on 2 Feb 2014: We researched for jobs that prefer CMTs again and found three vacancies. including one offered by BlackRock. a multi-national fund manager with around 4 trillion AUM.)

Next, the profile of current Chartered Market Technicians will also give us a sense of the professional value of the Chartered Market Technician. Although MTAs website listed the names and country of current Chartered Market Technicians, there is no information on their careers.

Hence, we surveyed the Linkedin profiles of 30 Chartered Market Technicians selected at random. (Random means the 5th result from each page of Google search results.)

Our key findings:

• Slightly less than half of the CMTs work for established MNCs. The others work for smaller boutique firms or national companies. A couple of them trade for themselves and offer freelance analysis services.
• Slightly more than half of the CMTs are in USA. A significant minority is from India.
• 6 CMTs have other financial designations. The most common is the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA).
• CMTs hold positions including trader, analyst, trainer, and salesperson.

Chartered Market Technicians are diverse and international. Despite being a relatively small group, it is a focused network of technical analysis professionals which includes senior members of their organisation.

Cost of the Chartered Market Technician Program

Our discussion of the value of the Chartered Market Technician is not complete without taking into account how much it costs.

This table shows a breakdown of the program costs.