For investment banking, do analysts ever use Crystal Ball? If so, how useful is it and how often is it used?
And was there a reason why my thread earlier, asking the same question, was deleted?
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maybe you shoudl explain what Crystal Ball (predictive modeling software) is...one of the mods probably thought you were being sarcastic.
I have never seen or heard of this program being used in IB but maybe someone else can chime in if they have...
I have it on my laptop. The mezz place I used to intern at used it along with another software package. It is really interesting software, not really useful in banking. The place I was at used it a lot to find what really effects sales and revenue. A lot of companies tell you that XYZ drives their CF, but until you run some regressions you really don't know. We used to run a lot of monte carlo stuff also, see the distributions. Since everything the shop did was risky mezz debt they really wanted to have a good handle on what drove their ability to repay.
Banking is more interested in putting lipstick on the pig.
Generally, no. Crystal ball is a neat package for monte carlo simulations, but whenever we had to run simulations we'd just write the VBA code ourselves so that it's compatible with every machine. Typical coverage/product IBD groups never get that technical...
In my product we do ( to test debt models/repayment ability) but as mentioned above, for most instances you won't ever need it.
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