4 Signs of an Excellent Financial Modeler
4 Signs of an Excellent Financial Modeler “On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being the best, how do you score yourself in Excel?” Quite possibly the most common…
How Many Tennis Balls Can Fit in a Room?
Assessing technical skills is not easy. While working at an investment bank and interviewing many junior hires, I asked a colleague how he assessed their technical ability. The response I received was,…
If you take shortcuts, you get cut short. — Gary Busey
Warning, this post may sound like blasphemy for seasoned financial modelers or any experienced Excel user. Using Excel shortcuts as quickly as possible has become a sign of a skilled modeler. It’s…
Swiss Army Knife vs. The Brain
While working with many different financial institutions, we noticed an interesting trend on how banks were organized to handle their analytics. Some would direct their resources to building a single…
“Don’t You, Forget About Me”: 5 of the Most Underappreciated Excel Functions
They languish behind the unused “Fx” button on the formula bar. When you use them for the first time you aren’t quite sure how to use them again. However, once you really…
Breaking Employees Down Before Bringing Them Back Up: Test Then Train
When we started developing our financial modeling testing platform, we thought the most likely customers would be companies looking to assess new hire candidates and using our subset analysis to…
“You must choose… but choose wisely.” The Career Path of a Financial Engineer
Between our various roles on Wall Street and even at Enstruct, we’ve seen a lot of financial engineers’ resumes, tested them, trained them, and watched careers evolve. However, like math…
Your Moment of CTRL-Zen
There comes a time when every financial modeler must pull away from the cells, the spreadsheets, the workbooks, and regain perspective. Formulas becoming four lines long, circular references popping up,…
