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What do you mean? Jupyter notebooks can already work with any kind of data (including fetched over the internet), and can already output to PDF.

• airstrike 7y ago
  They output to a PDF with very limited formatting... I mean something like these: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/826083/000119312513134593/d505474dex99c4.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/826083/0001193125131... https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/826083/000119312513134621/d505474dex99c24.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/826083/0001193125131... https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/826083/000119312513134593/d505474dex99c5.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/826083/0001193125131...
  • datagy 7y ago
    So you are talking about type of Notebook for Inline XBRL data rendering?
    • airstrike 7y ago
      This isn't exactly XBRL as the calculations are all bespoke, done for the purposes of these specific presentations My vision is separating financial analysis from formatting, or bringing CSS / markup languages into the world of Excel and sidestepping PowerPoint entirely if possible PowerPoint is a slide presentation tool that is sadly used for authoring so-called "books" with lots of formatting in Investment Banking, Management Consulting and Corporate America at large... and its shortcomings become immediately obvious As we speak (!!!), I'm having to reformat a book from our standard template into the client's template by manually resizing charts, recoloring series, etc... literally wasting hours of my time because we use Excel + PPT
      • iamwil 7y ago
        Wouldn't that mean clients would have to give you templates in CSS / markup? Or would you maintain different templates for different clients? And then the task would just be mapping the data generated to the templates, mad lib style?
        • airstrike 7y ago
          Client templates happen, but they aren't the norm. I pointed that example out as one egregious waste of time, but simply conforming Excel charts / tables to the company's format is very time consuming on a day-to-day basis. A lot of people just don't have an intuitive sense for design or plain don't care, so you're left with a high variance in the quality of the work that is produced. Speaking from my banking experience, the result is senior bankers have to spend time marking up documents on things like formatting, and junior bankers feel frustrated because they waste their productive hours on non-productive work. And it's generally a frustrating experience indeed as the tools we use aren't built for this purpose. But formatting is just part of it. "Code" reusability (more like financial model reusability) is basically zero, auditing is a pain and people use many different approaches to do the same things, but again with varying levels of efficiency and accuracy. I can tell you 10 ways to calculate Total Shareholder Returns for a public company using the FactSet add-in in Excel. Also several ways to pull Revenue and EBITDA figures, and these aren't even the more esoteric metrics like Free Cash Flow or Funds from Operations. These decks that we prepare should work like recipes. Input the ingredients and out comes the prepared dish, but everything is so god damn manual Not to mention issues with Excel itself, like how Excel's (non-cascading) styles and defined names (similar to variables) propagate to other workbooks if you copy-paste content from one to another, which in the long-term creates files full of garbage that crash and corrupt frequently The whole paradigm is a shit show. One day it will be different, I am certain. But nobody has taken a holistic, multi-disciplinary view at the problem because bankers / consultants don't know what is possible with today's technology and the ones trying to address these usability issues are only looking at a couple pieces of the puzzle at once
          • iamwil 7y ago
            I was curious about this problem so I went digging around. As I understand it, financial companies often want to gather data from multiple places but consolidated in a digestible form to make financial decisions. (what kind of financial decisions, I'm unclear on, since most trading is done by computers now, but maybe this is for ETFs or OTC trades) And they're use to looking at it on PDFs and Powerpoint, because that's what people email around, and no one trusts having financial slides on the web. (why, btw? In case they leak?) And because you have many clients that want the same or similar sort of analysis on publicly traded companies, you'd ideally be able to change the analysis once, and then generate all the PDF and PPT reports they want to see. It does seem like a giant waste of time to cut and paste data from excel into powerpoint by hand. However, you should be able to export Excel data to Power Point via the Visual Basic Editor. (https://www.wallstreetmojo.com/vba-powerpoint/ https://www.wallstreetmojo.com/vba-powerpoint/) Do people not use VB to prepare this? I don't get the impression that analysts in finanace would be willing to move from Excel to a notebook. Do you get a different sense? What would a notebook have to offer to get them to switch? Analysts generally seem to love Excel, with the exception of the slow first load and crash.
  • iamwil 7y ago
    Are these the outputs that you'd have to generate because your client has to submit reports to the SEC? Or am I misunderstanding?
    • airstrike 7y ago
      No, these are outputs that the client pays us to generate for them. These specific instances that I linked were from an example that was made public and then filed with the SEC, but usually these decks remain private