
Nearly half of private capital fund managers rely exclusively on Excel – survey - boshomi
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1bdt7701vdfpk/Private-Equity-Luddites-Cling-to-Excel
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Spivak
Alternative reading: A company trying to sell portfolio management software at
a premium calls the segment of their market not paying for their software
luddites for using a cheap, powerful, ubiquitous, general purpose tool that's
easy to find developers for -- that is currently meeting all their needs when
they _obviously_ should be paying for the shiny new thing.

~~~
smacktoward
Calling half your potential customer base idiots in public is certainly a...
let’s call it an _unconventional_ branding strategy.

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shaftway
Many many years ago I was at an investment bank. Our branch was in NYC, but
the bank was based in Europe (it's not important which bank). Our department
was principle finance, investing in synthetic CTOs. Our team was responsible
for building the real risk reporting system....

.... porting from Excel.

Those spreadsheets had been so tortured. There were custom macros that loaded
data from a multitude of other systems that had everything including quotes,
ratings, LIBOR curves. The whole thing would be loaded and an XML file was
generated. Then the quant tool ran against the XML generating a second XML
file. This would be loaded back into the spreadsheet, where everything would
be summed up and generate a series of CSV files that were then FTPed to some
central reporting system. All of it was run by Excel macros, and the whole
thing took about 2 hours, not including the quant work which could range up to
20 hours.

Historical records were just a series of copies of the file on a shared drive
that everyone had write access to, so be careful, and make sure you copy the
file locally if you need to look at it. Of course there were errors
everywhere. The spreadsheets had formula copy/paste errors often. and
sometimes you had to figure out when it was fixed or introduced by finding the
correct copy of the file.

This was the system of record for about ___$50bn_ __in assets.

We built a system to actually process this stuff in a real system. I was
pretty proud of it. We got the imports running in under 15 minutes, and then
we'd shard the work out to a farm of quant machines, so that we could
generally get runs done and loaded in another 15 minutes. I learned a lot from
the process, but in particular I learned that Excel is extremely powerful as a
prototyping tool. And when I have a one-off job or a prototype to build, I'm
much more likely to reach for a spreadsheet than an IDE.

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happytoexplain
What the hell? "Luddites"? Excel is fantastic, and I would bet on the
competence/brightness of anybody using it for anything complex.

~~~
cambalache
Judicious use of Excel would eliminate 90% of the shiny data science/machine
learning "libraries" out there. For me, Excel is the best commercial software
ever, even above Windows.

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dublin
One thing overlooked by the article is that portfolio management and other
similar applications often involve "trade secret" proprietary analysis and
evaluation methods. It's way easier to build, manage, and protect that sort of
IP in a spreadsheet than in other application environments. In particular,
it's reasonable to be leery of software that requires paying the vendor to
customize it, since at least some of your methodology is almost certain to
leak to competitors. Excel has many faults, but it does allow you to keep
everything behind your own walls, with no dependencies on vendors,
consultants, the cloud, etc.

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Ice_cream_suit
Meanwhile Institutional Investor continues to trot out thinly veiled marketing
fluff pieces, produced by self interested parties, as news articles.

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Ice_cream_suit
Excel is also used extensively by investment bankers and hedge fund bankers.

Because, it often is the right tool to use...

~~~
qohen
Relevant recent XKCD cartoon:

[https://xkcd.com/2180/](https://xkcd.com/2180/)

