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Show HN: Quantus – LeetCode for Financial Modeling

quantus.finance

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Re: Show HN: Quantus – LeetCode for Financial Modeling

#41

Post by misstercool »

headelf wrote: post #35

Isn't the purpose of AI so I don't have to learn this?

Just my personal opinion, feel free to disagree ;). There are few issues preventing finance being replaced by AI.

1. The large portion of finance is customization. AI works on the simple models, but it may struggle to perform adequately with complex, company-specific situations. Take pilot as example, it is an accounting and bookkeeping company with the combination of tech solution and human services. There is always human in the loop.

2. Finance deals with the numbers, the bar of accuracy is very high.

However, I believe AI can make learning finance much simpler, that is why I build this platform.

Re: Show HN: Quantus – LeetCode for Financial Modeling

#42

Post by teeray »

iknownthing wrote: post #11

People generally use leetcode to prepare for interviews and learning is kind of a side-effect so I'm curious are these questions similar to those you would find in interviews (i.e. like leetcode) or is it more for general learning purposes?

“Thanks for interviewing with us at H&R Block. I’m sure you’ll be great at helping people file their Income Taxes. In the next 45 minutes, we would like you to examine this conference room full of Banker’s Boxes of records for a Fortune 500 company accused of financial wrongdoing. You must determine whether they are guilty or not, and if guilty, the nature and extent of their crime.”

Re: Show HN: Quantus – LeetCode for Financial Modeling

#43

Post by barrenko »

misstercool wrote: post #17
jbs789 wrote: post #13

This looks really technically impressive. As someone who has worked in financial services for close to 20 years now, what I find interesting is how the experienced deal makers/traders/entrepreneurs have established mental models about how things work, then when evaluating a deal distill that down to a handful of reasons to do it (or not). So the hard part is knowing what to focus on, which changes based on the enviro…

Absolutely, the current platform is designed to help beginners and intermediate learners to hone their technical skills. I am considering expanding in areas such as allowing users to share their models and strategies. I understand it can be daunting for newcomers to an industry to figure out the best way to construct models. What are your thoughts on this?

In all seriousness, would this help me with something like CFA related certification? What other resources would you recommend to go along with Quantus?

Re: Show HN: Quantus – LeetCode for Financial Modeling

#44

Post by headcanon »

headelf wrote: post #35

Isn't the purpose of AI so I don't have to learn this?

Rest assured that the prevalence of AI means these skills will be even more important somehow. AI just made writing and coding skills even more important, not less, and I'd imagine the same will be true of finance and accounting.

Re: Show HN: Quantus – LeetCode for Financial Modeling

#46

Post by aiden3 »

I love this idea, this is really cool. I work on a joint data/business team and this would be useful for us. One piece of technical feedback: it would be good if you could press = and then use the arrow keys to select parts of your formula (like in excel). With quantus, I need to press =, and then switch to my mouse, and then click the cell (for example EBITDA), then press '/' on my keyboard, then go back to my mouse to select revenue, and then finally press equal, and then submit the assignment.

You should also make the tutorials/mini assignments slightly harder. Its really easy to calculate EBITDA margin when there are 2 lines on the page: revenue and EBITDA. It would be better if there were a few red herrings (like in a real financial statement/operating model). It would be even better if there were some harder stages where someone needs to first calculate EBITDA through the income statement, and then EBITDA margin.

Final piece of feedback: the various mini assignments in a module should all operate off of the same broader set of tabs/excel sheet. It would be rewarding to keep filling out more and more of the broader model, and also to have the context of the entire financial model available at any given time.

Happy to chat more. I would like to add something like this to my team's employee onboarding / training process.

Re: Show HN: Quantus – LeetCode for Financial Modeling

#47

Post by aiden3 »

aiden3 wrote: post #46

I love this idea, this is really cool. I work on a joint data/business team and this would be useful for us. One piece of technical feedback: it would be good if you could press = and then use the arrow keys to select parts of your formula (like in excel). With quantus, I need to press =, and then switch to my mouse, and then click the cell (for example EBITDA), then press '/' on my keyboard, then go back to my mouse…

A few more points of random feedback as I spend more time with it:

- In my wide monitor, the circle on the dark circle on the left that is supposed to be the background to the white descriptive text does not scale at the same rate as the text.. Which means that I can't read the right hand side of the text when opening the page wider than half of my screen (microsoft edge).

- Not a fan of the 3d birds on every page, sorry. If there needs to be birds, I prefer the birds on the homepage to the AI-generated looking ones on the /learn/module pages.

- Would be great to have 5+ LBO model building exercises for different business types/different formats.

- I don't know if this works in Google Sheets, but it would be good to have an exercise where people build a sensitivity table.

- An exercise where someone had to go to the investor relations website of a particular company, download a historical 10Q, seek out information from the income statement or balance sheet, and then calculate a metric or ratio would be excellent. (i.e,. something that brings you out of the context of Quantus/the in browser spreadsheet, but trains more on the actual action of seeking and using public filing data).

- I haven't been through everything, so you may already have it, but a double entry accounting exercise would be interesting. I find that people who haven't taken accounting courses in the past sometimes struggle with how the 3 statements fit together.

Re: Show HN: Quantus – LeetCode for Financial Modeling

#48

Post by conductr »

misstercool wrote: post #16
iknownthing wrote: post #11

People generally use leetcode to prepare for interviews and learning is kind of a side-effect so I'm curious are these questions similar to those you would find in interviews (i.e. like leetcode) or is it more for general learning purposes?

The current stage of finance interview is a little bit like coding interview 20 years ago, pre-leetcode time, where you write sudo code on a paper to answer some coding challenges. The coding interview nowadays are quite advanced, I believe Leetcode plays huge role. The best way of learning financial modeling is by doing it on the excel. Even though many finance technical interviews still focus on behavior type of qu…

I give folks an excel test. It’s more of a very basic modeling test as I provide some data and tell them what I want from it and see how they get to the answer. They do it in our office on our PC and access to the internet for help.

I’ve been giving it to candidates for over 15 years now. And seen some awful stuff out of it. Some people just spend an hour building 14 different pivot tables and never write a formula. I think it’s very easy but only about 10% of people do well on it. It’s not meant to be tricky either, like one question is “write a SUMIFS on the data table to determine X, Y, Z” and you can tell most people fumble with giving the formula the correct parameters or in the right order. This is a major red flag for me as a Financial Analyst, even if they don’t use that formula often, should be able to understand the instructions Excel is giving you OR use a search engine to figure it out in just a couple minutes.

On the SUMIFS problem, we tell them exactly which formula to use because we noticed early on if we didn’t then people would just say they had no answer, or not sure how to approach the problem.

Worth noting, I only ever interview people with minimum 2 years actual work experience as a Financial Analyst (Also managers, directors, VPs. Everyone gets tested). Also, it’s become better over time. I think colleges are pushing excel literacy as part of the curriculum more than they used to.

Re: Show HN: Quantus – LeetCode for Financial Modeling

#49

Post by misstercool »

aiden3 wrote: post #47
aiden3 wrote: post #46

I love this idea, this is really cool. I work on a joint data/business team and this would be useful for us. One piece of technical feedback: it would be good if you could press = and then use the arrow keys to select parts of your formula (like in excel). With quantus, I need to press =, and then switch to my mouse, and then click the cell (for example EBITDA), then press '/' on my keyboard, then go back to my mouse…

A few more points of random feedback as I spend more time with it: - In my wide monitor, the circle on the dark circle on the left that is supposed to be the background to the white descriptive text does not scale at the same rate as the text.. Which means that I can't read the right hand side of the text when opening the page wider than half of my screen (microsoft edge). - Not a fan of the 3d birds on every page, s…

- Adding the hotkey on the top my priority list.

- Agree with you on adding more challenging quizzes!

- Having the various mini assignments in a module on the same tab is an interesting idea.

- Regarding the bird lol, yea, I do plan to redesign the UI at some point to make it more professional look

- We are adding a few more LBO cases

- Sensitive table is a good idea

- Regarding your suggestion on auto-pulling finance data to build dynamic exercise, that is something I have been thinking about from the beginning.

- Double entry accounting is interesting! actually I have been considering building training materials to the offshore accounting firms.

Thank you so very much taking time playing around the tool and writing these thoughtful feedback! Really appreciate it!!

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