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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

#271

Post by sgt101 »

gaius wrote: post #251
sgt101 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you are taking many hours to process said data on a single processor machine (say eight cores) then throwing it into an environment where you can crunch it with many cores (say 1440) then this does make some kind of sense. Also putting the data into a secured multi user environment with redundancy and also business continuity. as opposed to fecking sharepoint

Well, if you are taking many hours to process said data on a single processor machine (say eight cores) then throwing it into an environment where you can crunch it with many cores (say 1440) then this does make some kind of sense Yes but https://aadrake.com/command-line-tools-can-be-235x-faster-th...

Sometimes, but it depends on what you are doing with a data set - even if it's 1.75Gb : from the link...

"Since the problem is basically just to look at the result lines of each file and aggregate the different results" which is why this works on this data for this problem. Many problems are not efficient to solve in this way, for example searches through large products and expansions, especially where the evaluation function is costly.

Some problems are data bound - you are handling 100'sTb of data, hadoop can be a good fit.

Some problems are CPU bound, and embarrassingly parallel - you require massive parallelism to get through the core seconds that you need to solve the problem. If you need 1 million core seconds and you have 1000 cores, and a way of getting the 1000 cores to do 1/1000th of the work... all is good.

Some problems are memory bound. You can build single space machines with many TB memory now, also you can cache with SSD's and optanes more than in the past, but Hadoop does offer a utility for these problems.

But in a corporate all problems are admin and discovery bound. If your dataset is what I need and I don't know about it, can't find it and anyway if I did then you won't give it to me and I can't unlock it legitimately; I am screwed. If it's a proper corporate asset then I've got a fighting chance.

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

#272

Post by drumhead »

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…

So True!

Spend a few million on a web based reporting system. Allows self service reports using real time data. As it runs on a browser literally anyone can use it.

Only problem - formatting and printing is for shit and users want it in excel so they can manipulate and format data how they want, on the pages they want, in the colors and font sizes they want.

I agree with Excel not being the most stable or error free platform for reporting, but is there any easy to use alternative? Whatever we try we keep coming back to Excel/spreadsheets.

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

#273

Post by johnbellone »

beobab wrote: post #248
flukus wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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."

A mistake plus keleven gets you home by seven.

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

#274

Post by bonesss »

twic wrote: post #121
chasedehan wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does your '=vlookup(x, ...)' have tests surrounding it? How about code review? How about source control?

In my experience, the fact there is a human being staring at the output all day goes a long way towards mitigating the lack of automatic tests. As programmers, we write tests because we can't see what's happening inside the program while it's at work, so we have to give it a thorough exam before letting it do that. Spreadsheet jockeys can take a radically different approach to validation.

There's also a bevy of issues that impact programmed systems that (in theory!), don't apply to Excel.

I can't guarantee the a programs output will be the same after every VM patch, component update, re-deployment, or even just re-compile. Generally we have multiple devs touching the same system, or same code. Generally we want that code to be robust in the face of reuse in other components and contexts. Generally we have no ability to see production errors unless they are properly logged and monitored, etc.

Worst of all I, a subject expert in nerdy things, am implementing a model in a domain I am an amateur in and have no fundamental context for assessing.

A spreadsheet jockey inverts all those problems. They know what they want, and are intimately connected to its operation.

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

#275

Post by MrMattWright »

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…

Just for fun I have a couple of nice Excel based stories from my time in Investment Banking.

Story 1: I Inherited a system once that had 1000s (yes thousands) of excel spreadsheets checked into SourceSafe (yes Source Safe) each sheet represented an Equity Derivatives trade, which was checked out and used by traders when pricing a deal. Also...now it gets fun...there were common functions for calculating the present value and risk metrics for each trade...so when we needed to calculate the risk the traders were running (intraday and end of day) we had a huge compute grid that would check the spreadsheets out and run them on virtualized windows boxes and sum the results to produce the official risk metrics for the bank's trading desk. Absolutely not making that up. I should really write a blog about it...it's truely terrifying.

Story 2: What if I told you that Excel has this little know function called RTD (real time data) that let's you stream data into sheets in well....real time. So you can see all your prices ticking away without refreshing the sheet. I also took over a system that had hundrends of sheets that did this (at this point you must be thinking this guy is a sucker for punishment) one of the problems here was latency...so each trader's sheet used their local machine to get prices...and the analytics library we used to calculate prices to an 'indeterminant' amount of time to execute. Oh...and one of the sheets published the banks prices out to Bloomberg...for trading. This whole mess was sorted out by eventually pricing everything centrally and pushing consistent numbers to bloomberg, the spreadsheets and the risk systems.

My overall summary is that excel is "what is dead but may never die" and you'd better embrace it if you want to deal with front office systems. That and I think people would be surprised to see how much systemic risk some of these places are running (i'm talking about a Top 15 bank here).

I sort of came to love it as a tool, but that's what people with Stockholm syndrome say right?

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

#276

Post by prepend »

I have a smart colleague of mine who has a story about “How Excel Saved the World.” He talks about how Excel was used so extensively during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, it was the most responsible software for analyzing data to stop the spread of the disease.

Excel certainly has limitations, but it has many features and is widely used.

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

#277

Post by skgoa »

intended wrote: post #208
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…

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,…

Yep and that's the same reason Matlab et.al. stay in their dominant positions. Sure, these tools can be a pain to work with and a lot of alternatives do a lot of things better, but most heavy users are happy doing the things they need to do.

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

#278

Post by woliveirajr »

znpy wrote: post #262

Since were all finally praising Excel for the marvel it is, I think it's also time for the OSS community to realize and acknowledge that OpenOffice/LibreOffice is quite crappy and should really see some serious improvement. Calc is basically a toy compared to Excel, and this is quite evident once you step out of the basic things. Anecdotally: a while ago i wanted to live-update a cell in my spreadsheet using python .…

so, if it didn't work and you gave up selling your bitcoins, it more than paid your work.

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

#279

Post by osullivj »

MrMattWright wrote: post #275
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…

Just for fun I have a couple of nice Excel based stories from my time in Investment Banking. Story 1: I Inherited a system once that had 1000s (yes thousands) of excel spreadsheets checked into SourceSafe (yes Source Safe) each sheet represented an Equity Derivatives trade, which was checked out and used by traders when pricing a deal. Also...now it gets fun...there were common functions for calculating the present v…

Story 1 sounds totally nuts, but Story 2 is a common setup in my experience. Using Bloomberg prices on the desktop is a lot cheaper than BPipe - the server side solution for BBG market data. And quoting indicative prices on BBG from Excel is common too. An interesting new startup that I follow - pricingmonkey.com - is doing BBG driven IRD pricing in the browser with an IR pricing library written totally in JS. There are more details on my blog at etrading.wordpress.com

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

#280

Post by MrMattWright »

osullivj wrote: post #279
MrMattWright wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for fun I have a couple of nice Excel based stories from my time in Investment Banking. Story 1: I Inherited a system once that had 1000s (yes thousands) of excel spreadsheets checked into SourceSafe (yes Source Safe) each sheet represented an Equity Derivatives trade, which was checked out and used by traders when pricing a deal. Also...now it gets fun...there were common functions for calculating the present v…

Story 1 sounds totally nuts, but Story 2 is a common setup in my experience. Using Bloomberg prices on the desktop is a lot cheaper than BPipe - the server side solution for BBG market data. And quoting indicative prices on BBG from Excel is common too. An interesting new startup that I follow - pricingmonkey.com - is doing BBG driven IRD pricing in the browser with an IR pricing library written totally in JS. There…

Yep, that was pretty much it. Price wars over BPipe vs Retuers. "You mean I have to pay twice? Once for my desktop and once for this BPipe thing, and that costs whhhhhaaat? How much?" Also it's not quite as terrifying as firm live pricing, it's only indicative with a good Bid/Offer spread. Enjoyed your blog....I like the Pricing Monkey idea. Would they be picking up the prices from the local machine though? Because surely any other way would mean the same large fees?
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