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He's got a Bloomberg console and he's typing data manually from a PDF into Excel. That's just got to be the incorrect workflow. If not, there is room for huge

He's got a Bloomberg console and he's typing data manually from a PDF into Excel. That's just got to be the incorrect workflow. If not, there is room for huge improvement in financial tools.

rahimnathwani 8y ago
There is value in thinking about the numbers as you build a model. Manually typing them in helps. Just like Zed Shaw's LPTHW tells you to type in the code from the book, and not copy-paste.
imron 8y ago
I used to work for a financial services company. Their main product was a 30 year old cobol program used by many large banks. Some of them would use our software to print various reports and then manually enter those printed values in to excel. Even worse, the software could export to a format excel could process so it wasn't necessary in the first place. Don't expect to be disrupting banking anytime soon though. Banks are incredibly risk averse, especially when it comes to messing with expensive legacy software that has been working for decades. At one point, one of the company's customers did an investigation to see how much it would cost to replace the software, and it was close to 9 figures, and so they decided it was more cost effective just to continue paying the multi-million dollar yearly licenses.
- badpun 8y ago
  > At one point, one of the company's customers did an investigation to see how much it would cost to replace the software, and it was close to 9 figures, and so they decided it was more cost effective just to continue paying the multi-million dollar yearly licenses. A bank I've worked at had a project to replace lots of bank's legacy (Mainframes and Cobol) with Java on Linux. The project's budget was over 1 billion dollars and it was estimated to take 5 years.
  - imron 8y ago
    The company I worked for tried to rewrite everything in Java twice. Both attempts cost millions, both were abandoned. The lessons (and pain) from the first attempt were ignored because not enough of the upper management were still around, and the only people who remembered the pain were the rank and file, who were ignored by the new upper management types looking to leave their mark on the product.
porlune 8y ago
I asked Shkreli about why he didn't automate his process, once, during his live stream. He quipped back that he'd been doing this for long enough to know how to do it and that I wasn't the first to ask him. Never did get a clear answer; but I'm assuming it has to do with what rahimnathwani said.
hedvig 8y ago
I thought this too - those earning reports can't be put through an API?

He's got a Bloomberg console and he's typing data manually from a PDF into Excel. That's just got to be the incorrect workflow. If not, there is room for huge improvement in financial tools.

rahimnathwani 8y ago

There is value in thinking about the numbers as you build a model. Manually typing them in helps. Just like Zed Shaw's LPTHW tells you to type in the code from the book, and not copy-paste.

imron 8y ago

I used to work for a financial services company. Their main product was a 30 year old cobol program used by many large banks. Some of them would use our software to print various reports and then manually enter those printed values in to excel. Even worse, the software could export to a format excel could process so it wasn't necessary in the first place. Don't expect to be disrupting banking anytime soon though. Banks are incredibly risk averse, especially when it comes to messing with expensive legacy software that has been working for decades. At one point, one of the company's customers did an investigation to see how much it would cost to replace the software, and it was close to 9 figures, and so they decided it was more cost effective just to continue paying the multi-million dollar yearly licenses.

badpun 8y ago
> At one point, one of the company's customers did an investigation to see how much it would cost to replace the software, and it was close to 9 figures, and so they decided it was more cost effective just to continue paying the multi-million dollar yearly licenses. A bank I've worked at had a project to replace lots of bank's legacy (Mainframes and Cobol) with Java on Linux. The project's budget was over 1 billion dollars and it was estimated to take 5 years.
- imron 8y ago
  The company I worked for tried to rewrite everything in Java twice. Both attempts cost millions, both were abandoned. The lessons (and pain) from the first attempt were ignored because not enough of the upper management were still around, and the only people who remembered the pain were the rank and file, who were ignored by the new upper management types looking to leave their mark on the product.

porlune 8y ago

I asked Shkreli about why he didn't automate his process, once, during his live stream. He quipped back that he'd been doing this for long enough to know how to do it and that I wasn't the first to ask him. Never did get a clear answer; but I'm assuming it has to do with what rahimnathwani said.

hedvig 8y ago

I thought this too - those earning reports can't be put through an API?