Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands • Hacker News Board

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#231

Post by ilkan » Fri, Dec 01, 2017, 7:03 AM UTC

Former finance developer: 1. Without Excel, every finance company will need another 100 developers, BA's, managers and QA to do programming and updates. $$$$.

2. Most of the data sources I've seen are heterogenous or very expensive. It comes in from big companies via secure FTP overnight, small companies via pdf. Big companies won't change their rules for you, small ones don't have the staff to do it. You can quietly and immediately export to excel from a terminal at 5pm, or be charged an extra 200K a year for the overnight deluxe data export package and still not get the same bond valuation you need to reconcile. (looking at you, Bloomberg!).

3. Every rockstar portfolio manager has their own models, and not even the VP of IT dares tell them what to use. There's no "bog-standard model" that everyone uses. That's the expensive PM's edge.

4. Speed. Requirements, test cases, test server, scheduling personnel, project planning, testing, promotion to prod, signoff, takes a month for trivial stuff if you're lucky. Trading opportunity long gone. Analysts grab a spreadsheet, do it in half a day, make or reject the trade.

5. Capability. Pivot tables. Compact, resizeable, color-coded, read/writeable grid, notations on the side, instant recalc, reorientable text. Row inserts. Printing. Ugh.

6. Risk. Analyst does the spreadsheet, IT hands are clean. "Not our fault if you screw up".

7. Resumes. What developer wants to spend 10 years coding models and reports that are regularly modified or discarded with each new analyst and PM's whim?

8. Time. FO spends 16 hours a day trading or researching under immense stress. Asking them to find, let alone spend, 2 hours a day explaining workflows to devs is... unrealistic.

9. Education. Devs know development, not financial instruments and regs. SME's who understand both software design and finance are rare and expensive therefore used on major projects. This may hurt egos here but most devs are some combination of untrained/low social sensitivity/ESL/fragile egos/tend to start explaining a solution instead of first listening to the problem.

Devs do major dev stuff where it's warranted. Analysts can keep Excel where it's not.

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#232

Post by dang » Fri, Dec 01, 2017, 7:07 AM UTC

Havoc wrote: post #159

Every time I (as a finance supposed "professional") comment on finance article on hn I get downvoted to hell. Note to self - stick to IT stuff when interacting with IT crowd. Yes dear IT crew, in the IT world virtualisation is in this month and docker next and kubernetes the month after. Finance side it's excel as swissknife this year and probably the next 5 years too. Get over it. Anyway - see also djtriptych's post…

You'll get no quarrel from me about the supremacy of Excel, but could you please stop including complaints about downvotes in your HN comments? It's unsubstantive and breaks the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

I looked at your comment history and it's far from true that you're always getting downvoted. I realize it can feel that way. Everybody gets downvoted; the thing to do is (a) examine your comment to see if you missed something bad, then (b) move on. And remember that some downvotes are just misclicks.

I did notice one unfairly downvoted comment and fixed that. By contrast https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15820012 was properly downvoted since it broke the site guidelines.

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#233

Post by flukus » Fri, Dec 01, 2017, 7:10 AM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #228

intended wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As unpopular as it would be to say - Stop trying. Excel is a phenomenal accomplishment, and while everyone may talk about a better spread sheet, the market really doesn't want it or need it. Its basically craigslist. The only people who think it can be or needs to be done better are primarily not the users. Excel is the human condition, messy, varied, capable of doing many things and most of the features aren't used,…

The problem with Excel is that whilst it's an easy development environment, and a vastly flexible one, it's absolute death to debug. At Uni, decades ago (and using Lotus-1-2-3 rather than Excel), we were given a set of spreadsheet templates for a business management exercise (the project ran much the duration of the course). I discovered looking at these that there was an error in the spreadsheet double-counting all…

> I discovered looking at these that there was an error in the spreadsheet double-counting all inputs (rows and columns were added and the row-totals included in the grand total). Best I can tell, finding that bug was not in fact part of the course goal....

Multiple times I've come across issues like this when developing the replacement for an old access system. The numbers between the new an old system don't match, so you have to dig through both to find the error. If the error is in the new version that's great, but when you tell the boss that the error is in the old one and they've been off by a few million dollars over the years...

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#234

Post by intended » Fri, Dec 01, 2017, 7:16 AM UTC

sanityUnbounded wrote: post #189

agar wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have tried to improve on that big grid of cells since VisiCalc in 1979. Considering it's the weakest part, it has been remarkably difficult to find something better. As someone that spent years being buried in complex spreadsheets for hours a day (and supported and trained others who spent literally 12 hours a day building models), I can't think of a better combination of functionality, capability, and usabili…

And it makes sense why it works so well. On a 2D screen, seeing data in linear rows and columns is the best option because it follows the same format we have been taught verbatim since birth. The first type of data processing a person does is learn to read. Left to right, each letter (column) represents a different sound (value), these letters build a picture, and the more of them there are the more information the s…

I always pour water on the AR VR user input ideas - The calorific need is too high - and thinking in 3D results in an unnecessary cognitive load.

Since this thread probably has more Finance users than usual - most people have seen a bloomberg terminal. Its ugly, and filled with arcane short cuts.

Its extremely extremely good at getting its job done, and keyboard short cuts and commands are the fastest system once you gain expertise.

Keyboard short cuts and memorized lists of invocations will regularly be the fastest way of activating commands on a system for experts. Especially once it becomes muscle memmory.

For most abstract symbol manipulation, most jobs can get away with a stack of 2D pages.

If you are working in 3D, then you are doing a pretty unique set of modifications, and the average case will not apply to you.

Which is to say that AR VR will be only for a very niche set of uses.

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#235

Post by dmurray » Fri, Dec 01, 2017, 7:23 AM UTC

throwaway613834 wrote: post #146

dmurray wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an amazingly pervasive myth taught in CS 101 courses that "you should never use floating point types for currencies, or you might go to jail". In reality floats are fine for most financial applications, and for almost all those that would find themselves in a spreadsheet.

> It's an amazingly pervasive myth taught in CS 101 courses that "you should never use floating point types for currencies, or you might go to jail". In reality floats are fine for most financial applications, and for almost all those that would find themselves in a spreadsheet. What do you think about this then? https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/issues/2014/mar/excel-c...

I think that if anyone ever needs to give me 12 quadrillion dollars (more than a million dollars for every human alive), they can keep the extra 21 dollars.

I'm not unfamiliar with the idea that floating point numbers have a limited precision, I'm saying the precision is normally good enough.

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#236

Post by kgwgk » Fri, Dec 01, 2017, 7:28 AM UTC

djtriptych wrote: post #177

opportune wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehh I doubt most quants are interacting much with Excel except when they need to work with non-quants. There's not much of a reason to use Excel when you could use something like Pandas instead, plus the Python libraries/environment will make everything non-tabled better to deal with anyway.

it's different now but historically quants were not well versed in software engineering. If anything it would have been R 10-15 years ago.

R was almost irrelevant in finance 10 years ago, Matlab was much more widely used. R may have more momentum now, but I’m not sure it has overtaken Matlab yet. And C++ was, and probably remains, king.

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#237

Post by SolarNet » Fri, Dec 01, 2017, 7:33 AM UTC

d--b wrote: post #66

Finance dev guy here. Excel's dominance in the field is because it is an _application container_ that _non_ dev people can use. The workflow is this: - old trader guy says to his junior guy: "hey can you look into xxx." - junior trader guy says: "sure I'll make a spreadsheet for it" - old trader guy: "great your model is all I need, let's trade" - several weeks later, IT guy says: "hey you're running a $100m book out…

I think part of the problem is the mindset of devs that try to tackle this. Excel is the dynamically typed python to the statically typed and compiled C++ of most web apps. The power of excel is that people can build their own little apps in it as needed. Any replacement to Excel will require those features first, and then you can build specialized integrations.

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#238

Post by cm2187 » Fri, Dec 01, 2017, 7:39 AM UTC

btilly wrote: post #142

d--b wrote: post #66

Finance dev guy here. Excel's dominance in the field is because it is an _application container_ that _non_ dev people can use. The workflow is this: - old trader guy says to his junior guy: "hey can you look into xxx." - junior trader guy says: "sure I'll make a spreadsheet for it" - old trader guy: "great your model is all I need, let's trade" - several weeks later, IT guy says: "hey you're running a $100m book out…

At a former job I had to build a reporting system. And had the trust to build it however I wanted. But it was my job to make it sufficiently useful that everyone would use it. The smartest thing that I did was make it accessible from Excel. You could build a spreadsheet off of my report. Refresh the spreadsheet, the report ran, you got updated data. I got essentially 100% adoption, and the rest of my job was spent fi…

That’s a very good approach. I found the best way to do that it to be able to query the report with Excel formula (which is probably what you did). It gives an incredible flexibility to the business to build tables and charts for whatever presentations they need to do.

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#239

Post by cm2187 » Fri, Dec 01, 2017, 7:52 AM UTC

sdrinf wrote: post #184

btilly wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a former job I had to build a reporting system. And had the trust to build it however I wanted. But it was my job to make it sufficiently useful that everyone would use it. The smartest thing that I did was make it accessible from Excel. You could build a spreadsheet off of my report. Refresh the spreadsheet, the report ran, you got updated data. I got essentially 100% adoption, and the rest of my job was spent fi…

This sounds an incredibly useful capability to have. May I ask which data connector did you used to pull data, and how did you made it available in that format from the app side?

If you can code, I suggest creating a custom addin with something like ExcelDNA. You offer an excel function to load the report in memory based on a given date, name or whatever. And a few functions to query that loaded report, that take as parameter the value returned by the load function to identify the report.

So that gives the user the ability to query for a certain date, or sum for a date range, or to get a breakdown by some meta data. Being able to load multiple reports allows them to do deltas. And switching to a newer version of the report just takes changing the argument of the load function and press F9.

Worth also giving the users sample spreadsheet, or having a way to export the full report with all these formulas in Excel so that they can learn by example.

The only thing to watch for is memory clean up. You need somehow to have a way to unload all reports otherwise your memory blows up over time.

Re: Finance Pros Say You’ll Have to Pry Excel Out of Their Cold, Dead Hands

#240

Post by uridium » Fri, Dec 01, 2017, 7:57 AM UTC

yosyp wrote: post #167

toomuchtodo wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like Excel needs a git extension!

A quick google search shows some people are already working on that, including https://www.pathio.com

Schematiq - https://www.schematiq.com also handles source control for spreadsheet and a lot more. The platform is about making sheets enterprise grade applications - regression, testing, CI etc and introduces new features to simplify spreadsheet logic.