Meet the pioneers behind the success of the Chartered Financial Analyst Program in author Nancy Regan's vivid account of the evolution of the charter and of CFA Institute in The Gold Standard: A Fifty-Year History of the CFA Charter. Benjamin Graham, the "Dean of Wall Street," recognized the need for a professional certification for financial analysts in the 1940s. In those early years, analysts lacked the formal training and recognition that other professions, such as law and medicine, benefitted from, but Graham and a group of volunteers set out to change that. Follow their exciting journey from the 1960s to the present as they develop and build a generalist program, specifically centered on what practitioners need to know, with strong ethical content. Featuring an introduction by Charles D. Ellis, CFA, the book traces the creation of a program that The Economist in 2005 hailed as the "purest example" of a distance learning program that controls its curriculum, sets standards, and issues credentials uniformly and consistently. A must-read in today's volatile but dynamic global economic environment