How do you actually build your football fields — CapIQ, template, or from scratch?
Curious how people here handle these day to day. Building one properly — pulling comps, running the DCF sensitivities, layering in analyst targets and 52-week range, then formatting the chart — still eats a couple hours even with a decent template.
Few questions for the group:
- What's your setup — CapIQ/FactSet plug-ins, a firm template, or Excel from scratch?
- What part takes the longest / annoys you most?
- For those who went through recruiting recently — did you build these for interview prep, and what did you use?
- Has anyone found (or tried to find) a tool that just generates the whole thing from a ticker? Would that even be trusted, or does everything need to be defensible line-by-line?
Asking partly because I'm exploring whether this is automatable end-to-end and want to know if the manual process exists for a reason or just inertia.
What’s your angle
I'm exploring building a tool that generates these from a ticker and I'm trying to figure out if the manual process exists for defensibility reasons or just inertia before I sink more time into it. Not selling anything, nothing to link. Genuinely want to know what your setup is and what part you'd actually want automated.
Building football fields is a meticulous process, and based on the most helpful WSO content, here's how it's typically approached:
Setup Options:
Time-Consuming Steps:
Recruiting Prep:
Automation Potential:
If you're exploring automation, consider focusing on tools that assist with data gathering and initial setup while still allowing for manual adjustments and validations. This hybrid approach could strike the right balance between efficiency and defensibility.
Sources: What kind of tools / apps do you wish existed in the industry?, Modeling question: creating your own CFS, That’s Why He’s The GOAT | The Daily Peel | 12/19/22, Is Excel Inferior ?, 7 Practical Tips for Entering 1st Year IBD Analysts
AI slop begone, you learn how to do a basic bar chart on day 1 of training. Pls find a better idea
Correct, the chart itself is trivial. The two hours is in pulling and scrubbing the inputs, which is fine when the bank's paying for CapIQ. Question's really aimed at people who don't have that.
For anyone doing basic work, they're going to have CapIQ etc. The only people that do not have professional tools are retail/non-professionals. Creating ai versions of a comp table is like creating a startup to go after Figma lol.
If you want to build a tool to help professionals then you need to make tools that connect with the existing professional stack, not replace them. That's harder for you to do, yes, but c'est la vie.
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