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So there's this weird playlist about Excel by Martin Shkreli of all people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI_riscmviI&list=PLJsVF3gZDc...

It keeps popping up as he is apparently quick and knows the ins and outs. But I've never bothered to go through it as it is seven years old at this point and focused on finance.

Can anybody recommend something similar but up to date with the new goodies so a fella could be competitive at this? I'm talking more keyboard shortcuts and advanced features (many of them overlap). The latest versions of Excel sort of open it up anew.

puts on headband and cracks knuckles




I've watched Shkreli livestream financial modeling and I've watched the excel world championship and he's on another level. I'd study him any day.


Shkreli had quite a following back in the day.. there was a video archive and a few of his padawans got quite rich


It helped that those streams of his were nothing what a normal person from the outside would expect from him. So the audience for his financial analysis streams self-selected kinda nicely.

TLDR on those streams: it was Shkreli just opening excel spreadsheets and going super deep on analysis of corporate financials, in the most plain unemotional way possible. He even did fun exercises to show his viewers how he works things: the audience would vote for a random public company ticker that Shkreli never analyzed betore, and he would just spend the next few hours populating his excel spreadsheet from scratch and trying to make some conclusions. With the preference for picking companies that he actually knows absolutely nothing about in terms of their finances. Literally just gathering all relevant publicly available information and analyzing it, with lots of hard numbers and excel magic involved. No joking, no non-sequiters, no guests, just lazer-focused on financial analysis. Not going to lie, it blew my mind when i was first trying to follow along at the time.

If you aren’t into that type of a thing, i imagine it would be extremely boring to watch, as it was nothing like his “more known” livestreams focused on trolling and ragebaiting. It was just cold “thinking outloud and populating spreadsheets” type of content. The viewership numbers reflected that too, with the financial analysis streams having magnitudes less views (with most people not even knowing they existed, despite being posted on the same channel as his more popular and controversial streams).


Well, I know what I’m going to be watching for the next few hours…

I find these types of analysis very helpful at work and building strong fundamentals has never left me regretting the time investment.


Just invest in Nvidia instead


Didn't Shkreli get rich from the market way before his shenanigans started? And he did it from scratch, the old school, poor immigrant from New York way. Shkreli is the misssed opportunity of the Obama years


Yeah, he went working on wallst at some firm at 16 and never went to college, comes from an albanian immigrant family of little means (his dad was a janitor iirc).


Sounds great. I wasn't aware he has a reputation as a stock picker. All I know about him is that he had some shenanigans with Pharma price gauging and that's both how he made his money and ended up in jail.

The trolling is uninteresting except maybe the Wu Tang thing.

I'm only after pure Excel-fu here. It is actually weird for me that people use it to analyze stocks instead of Python but I probably don't know what I'm missing.

Edit: The first few minutes seem neat, I'm biting the bullet


I don't believe he ever got in trouble for pharma pricing. It was securities fraud.


Sorry I misremembered. The Pharma pricing thing just made him an easy target for the media you are correct.


Where do I find the archive?


Here is the playlist[0] with all his financial analysis videos.

While looking for it, I also re-discovered his chemistry lessons playlist[1]. Which i totally forgot about until now, but can recommend almost just as much to those interested in the topic. Just looking at the video titles, you can tell it is legit.

Personally, I am extremely thankful for those, as chemistry has been my own largest knowledge gap in terms of science fundamentals. At any point in HS or college where I had to pick more science classes, I always picked physics over chem, because I wasn’t really into chem at all back then (and maybe a bit self-conscious about my lack of pre-existing knowledge of it, as everyone at my college seemed to have taken AP Chem beforehand, which I didn’t).

0. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJsVF3gZDcuTxcdH5FmQRTd6M...

1. https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJsVF3gZDcuQ_MijwAR113CdJ...


Shkreli would definitely be sith, and so he would have apprentices, not padawans :P


Or maybe acolytes!




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