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Meetings that involve lots of politics
A pretty obvious one is data entry. It’s not that much time anymore but I don’t think I’ll be able to get away from it completely for a couple more years.
Formatting columns in excel
That's got nothing on exporting them to powerpoint so that they go into the page correctly, look right, and are sized right.
It's my second biggest pet peeve behind when people give you a powerpoint, but built it with all of the charts saved as a separate excel file that they didn't bother to include. How the f--- am I supposed to update the data when its in a file you didn't include? Seriously people, build your datasets into the powerpoint itself. don't link them.
As to a regular task though? I spent every weekday morning for several years downloading a 3000 row X 250 column Morningstar Direct file into Excel. Running a search in Simfund Filing and downloading it similarly. After all this I'd open up a 30+mb excel file and go get coffee as it processed the data from both. Afterwards I'd export it all to PDF, maybe write two or three lines of commentary and send it out to about 40 people.
That final excel file was a nightmare. It'd break if you looked at it wrong. I implored some great excel jockeys I knew, as well as the guy who built it to help me with it. Nothing worked, and I ended up just figuring out how it worked well enough to doctor the underlying exports so the final output was right.
Sounds like you should’ve spent a weekend teaching yourself basic VBA.
No direct access to the databases. They're proprietary (and very expensive) vendor data only accessible via proprietary front-ends. If I could scrape them then I wouldn't need their extensive history, which is their greatest asset. Everybody from Bloomberg on down has access hurdles and consumption limits, including how you can export a dataset. Trust me, I've hit most of them.
Appreciate you not coming back at my neck and the in depth reply. You’re a better man than me. But why not use powerBi and VBA to sensitize the data?
So I'm assuming that your speaking of manually fixing the underlying data here?
At the risk of divulging too much, the issue is that when ETFs with cap gains rebalance they generally take in assets a day or two before to buy the new securities they want from a friendly AP, then dump the securities they don't want in-kind via custom baskets at essentially the same price a day or two later to wash out the cap gains and close the AP's position. Morningstar is smart enough to have people manually scrub this data from the monthly flow files, but it's still in the daily ones. The programmer who built the excel glued monthly to daily MTD. For some funds this happened over month end though. The solution was to manually zero out the offsetting flow. It wasn't quite client level kosher, but much better than the alternative, and good enough for internal reporting.
Yeah, I actually raised this pretty high with Morningstar, and eventually got told to go away.
If you actually want to read about this process in layman's terms, I recommend googling "heartbeat trades." Do not EVER use that phrase in the industry though. Something along the lines of "customs for the rebal" is appropriate.
LP reporting
This. Bane of my existence. I can say with confidence that LPs don’t look at 95% of the shit we send them... it’s all just to check the box for the sake of checking the box (no value-add).
I'll see that and one-up you with fund board memos and mandated manager commentary in annual reports. The board didn't know what they were looking at, and I always felt like the physics Ph.D. writing for a fifth grade science class. The annual reports were even worse. I promise that not a single person read half of my fund commentaries other than the PMs who supposedly had 'authored' them. There were marketing materials for investors, but hey, the SEC has to SEC.
Anything IT related because boomers gonna boom.
They’ll send long ass emails effectively asking to set up a zoom meeting, when in that time it took them to type up that email, they could’ve done it themselves.
Spreading comps
Formatting slides
Replying to emails
Benchmarking
Data entry
Yep... that's the whole job
Manually extracting data (or ETL in general). You'd think a billion-dollar business would put some money and effort into some centralized API-center, where everyone in the company can just do some queries, and data comes out - but no, still - in 2020 - we're forced to download spreadsheets and filter/copy/paste stuff manually. And when you want to automate this with simple Python scripts or whatnot, the IT department just laughs and says nope, can't have that.
Close second would be writing reports and documents that you know will vanish into a black hole once they're delivered.
I really am blown away by how much of this stuff can be solved by using VBA. It is probably the easiest language to learn and can provide so many benefits.
How would you recommend learning it? I've been meaning to for the longest time but keep getting sidetracked. I've seen a couple people say they self-learned, but I know personally I need some kind of semi-structured course and then to work through problems to learn it.
Look up wiselowl on YouTube. The guy does a phenomenal job. But for me, I learned by finding things I wanted to automate and then googling things until i “figured” it out. I was fortunate that I had this curiosity in college and started learning then.... it really probably made the difference in the workplace that I had a decent framework to start with.
So much admin...
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