Teaching myself to model

I’m currently a student at a small liberal arts school recruiting for IB and I want to teach myself how to model both to develop the skills and make a reasonable argument to people in the industry that, no I didn’t go to Wharton, but I’ve tried to remedy my educations shortcomings.

I have reasonable experience in excel and built a three statement model in my last internship, so I’m thinking I’ll try building a DCF from scratch. Any thoughts on resources/something to compare it to/a way to get feedback on the final output?

6 Comments
 

I liked watching RareLiquid DCFs, he has a ton of them on mega caps. You can try to follow along with one, and then maybe make your own from the template, inputting historicals changing all the assumptions etc, and then maybe try one from scratch on a company he did as well and compare at the end.

 
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If you're at a non-target your absolute best use of time is networking. You really do not need to learn to model. It's never going to come up in interviews, and if you proactively bring it up you are inviting much harder technical questions. No one cares that you don't go to Wharton, plenty of non-targets make it in but using your time wisely is a huge part of this.

I get you want to show your work ethic and be a self-starter, but this is just not a good use of time when you could send out a hundred or more intro emails in the time it'll take you.

 

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