Hi All,
I spent the last summer @ a BB in S&T and was fascinated by the comprehensiveness of some of the trader's excel models (particularly derivatives). I am curious, for those of you who began your career in S&T from undergrad, how quickly were you able to develop this level of competency in excel? Assuming you were not a computer science major/excel superstar coming out of undergrad. I am admittedly just average at excel and a bit of imposter syndrome settled in when I sat with some of these guys. I left wondering if these guys grew up playing with spreadsheets instead of etch-a-sketches.
I suppose this doesn't have to be confined to S&T with the more basic questions of: - What was your level of Excel proficiency when you first started as a graduate? - How long did it take you to become competent (i.e. your models provided some form of value)? - What did you do to develop your proficiency?
Obviously, the immediate answer here is practice practice practice, but maybe there are some tips to shorten the learning curve.
Hey mate,
Very much know the feeling, but I don't think it's anything worth panicking about.
1) When I left uni, my Excel proficiency was, I suppose, average to good. I was competent using vlookup / indexmatch and pivots, and was semi-literate in basic VBA.
2) My competency improved drastically once I started working full time. When you get to the point where you're literally staring at a spreadsheet 10+ hours per day, it's not entirely surprising how quickly you begin to level-up and new concepts sink in. I suppose my own spreadsheets began to provide personal value after approximately 2-3mos and desk value after 6-7mos.
3) The biggest help I had in terms of Excel competency was actually from an internship working with a quant fund. Although they provided the skeleton for a lot of their models, you were very much left to fill in the blanks yourself. A lot of the time, this came (for me) from reverse engineering previous models and then applying what I'd learnt to my own.
In terms of shortening the learning curve, I'd suggest making your spreadsheets as easy to interpret as possible. The amount of times I've come to help someone with their Excel and it's a poorly labelled mess is innumerable. If you can keep things tidy and intuitive: i) Your future self, if you ever have to revisit a model, will thank you; ii) It makes matters immensely easier for any more seasoned colleague to help you out.
It's also worth noting that, while you may be expected to make a basic model for the desk as an "exercise," it's unlikely you'll be left for dead - chances are, someone will send you a copy of their model to adapt for your own purposed over time / there will be a base model that's distributed to new joiners to give them a basic set of pricing tools. There's also a lot of this stuff (e.g. basic option pricing) on Bloomberg / on the bank's in-house pricing platform.
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