Carlos H. answered • 07/18/21
Certified Treasury Professional with Series 7 and Financial experience
The Series 7 exam is also known as the General Securities Representative exam. It qualifies an individual to sell the financial securities and products. You can only take the exam if you are sponsored by a firm, so unfortunately you cannot be self-employed in a regulated market with the Series 7 alone. Fortunately though, FINRA offers the Series 65 exam, which does not require you to be sponsored by an existing firm. There may be many licensing and start-up requirements/fees by your state however so it's important to research what your state requires with the passing of the Series 65 exam. Besides these exams, there are many others that test on different areas of finance and regulations that allow one to serve as a financial advisor in other capacities and/or only focus on more specific security types. For example, the Series 66 exam qualifies you as a fiduciary, holding you to higher standards when selling investment products to any clients by law. The many exams are generally reflective of more specific areas in securities, but the Series 7 is usually one of the more common ones as it usually gives a securities agent the most bang for the buck from what I have seen. FINRA has a great amount of information on their website and you can find more specific info on each Series exam on Investopedia.com
