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

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

#241

Post by vostok »

kgwgk wrote: post #236
djtriptych wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think a lot of the discrepancy is explained by the fact that quant is a very widely applied title. There are quants who spend most of their day in Excel and quants who spend most of their day in C++.

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

#242

Post by throwaway613834 »

dmurray wrote: post #235
throwaway613834 wrote: post #146

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. 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.

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

You're missing the point. You don't need a 1-cent error for a smaller error to throw things off. Say someone owes you $0.30 and pays you $0.10 and $0.20. If the data type inherently has 2 digits past the decimal, or if you just do everything with integers, then they'll be debt-free by the end and nothing will go wrong. But if you're representing these with binary floats, then you have to remember to explicitly do rounding at precisely the correct intermediate spots in order to avoid incorrectly listing them as still having a balance. Even for a programmer it's too easy to either put it or forget to put it in the correct spot, let alone for a non-programmer writing the sheet.

And that's just one example. I'm sure there are tons more I can't think of off the top of my head. It's not like people made the decimal data types for nothing.

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

#243

Post by UK-AL »

ilkan wrote: post #231

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…

"untrained/low social sensitivity/ESL/fragile egos/tend" I don't think that's dev's problem.

I think it's more like how society likes to treat devs. I'm telling you now, fund managers are bigger prima donnas than devs. But they make tons more money for the fund and so everybody steps inline.

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

#244

Post by rishabhparikh »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #157

IMHO all the people who claim having intelligence and education sufficient for a finance job should be able to use at least basic SQL and/or R and/or Q to work with up-to-date information straight from the databases without importing it to a spreadsheet first. Perhaps I am terribly wrong but my intuition suggests entrusting a company finance to a person unable to learn some SQL/R may happen to be a questionable idea.

But... why would they waste time doing that when they COULD just do it in a visual format they're already familiar with? IMO writing excel formulas and having the constant visual feedback is pretty useful and I much prefer it to SQL even though I am very familiar with SQL and not so much with Excel.

No need to make an assertion about intelligence and learning programming languages in your comment here either. Everyone has their own workflow.

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

#245

Post by cm2187 »

rabboRubble wrote: post #197
guitarbill wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hard to recreate in a formal financial system that must pass internal and external audits. This should also be the reason for getting rid of Excel, it is basically inauditable. But then again I guess all the auditing firms (e.g. Deloitte, KPMG, EY) probably have a vested interest in keeping it that way, not to mention all the persons who use this deniability for fudging numbers. I guess we'll always have ethics to…

I've worked in global banking environments (where one holding company contains a traditional banking arm and a securities firm) with a slight lean towards securities operations, although I've serviced both the banking and securities operations. Your exact comment happens constantly in global banking firms. If the banking arm happens to be in a stronger management position, they push towards locked down system with ti…

And I am sure that like me, you have witnessed multiple production systems used for critical missions that are simply too old or expensive to update, or that have been marked legacy but never replaced. These systems are as problematic as spreadsheets.

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

#246

Post by cm2187 »

owenversteeg wrote: post #87

Everyone talks about trying to create a new type of programming environment, something intuitive and visual and that lets you think in new and creative ways. Excel is exactly that. It's easy and nonintimidating to nonprogrammers. It's visual, intuitive, and with a basic understanding of math and an idea of cells you can do a large number of tasks that would otherwise require a program. Yes, it's a problem when it get…

To be honest there is a case for teaching business users to program. But the blank page of the IDE is intimidating for people who do not know where to start, particularly if they have their boss breathing down their neck to get it done today.

That’s where a basic programming training at school or university would be priceless. Not to make everyone a programmer. But to make everyone able to better perform and automate mundane tasks.

IT departments would hate that even more than business users using Excel. But in the mind of most IT departments, business users should only be allowed to click a couple of buttons and should budget & prioritise an IT project if they need anything else.

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

#247

Post by cooper12 »

Balgair wrote: post #95
djtriptych wrote: post #44

Watch some youtube vids of Excel pros moving around the UI quickly. There's no other UI I can think of where so much is being done so quickly except maybe a bash pro. America's favorite villain Martin Shkreli was pretty amazing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw&feature=youtu.be...

I'm ok with vi, and ol' Martin 'wurmtongue' Shkreli is pretty good, but what is more amazing is that he has people watching him stream. When you try telling your uncle at thanksgiving (who 'dabbles' in finance) that someone like Grimma there would stream his analysts, let alone that people would watch him, they look at you like you have 10 green heads. Shkreli there is a perfect example of a generation gap.

He has a cult of personality like all scumbags who make money. Everyone will kiss their ass to find out their "secret sauce" when it's usually just exploiting people and general psychopathy. He's a big favorite of the 4chan-types because he makes money while pissing people off and is the embodiment of capitalism.

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

#248

Post by beobab »

flukus wrote: post #233
dredmorbius wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

Been there: "No. The old is correct. Make the new way match."

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

#249

Post by gaius »

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…

Exactly this. I dunno if you have seen old movies where there is a guy at a desk and in front of him is a pad - built into the desk - with large stacked sheets of paper tucked in at the corners to hold them down, A3 size or larger. This was used to just do any quick bit of writing, make a note, do a calculation, sketch something out, whatever. When a page had been sufficiently dooodled on it was just peeled off the top and there was a fresh one underneath ready to go. THAT is the experience Excel replicates. A dedicated, single-function piece of software to do a particular task COMPLETELY misses the point.

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

#250

Post by gaius »

agar wrote: post #140
Declanomous wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it could be like the place I worked where IT made as many hurdles as possible to the installation of new software. So I, as a database marketing associate, linked 4 different CRMs used by different departments together using the magic of Access, Excel and VBA. IT found out when they disabled a library (DAO) because "cryptolockers" could use it, only to break almost every single process at my organization. The IT d…

Version control in Excel VBA is easy. Just do a Save As..."Mission Critical Finance Model v2.xlsm", then "Mission Critical Finance Model v3.xlsm", then "Mission Critical Finance Model v3a (temp with changes for Jim).xlsm" and then "Mission Critical Finance Model v4 (maybe-trying to merge 3a back-DO NOT USE).xlsm" and so on...

The funny thing is you can save your spreadsheet into Sharepoint which does have version control and people still do it that way in Sharepoint too...
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