[MrMattWright]

Just for fun I have a couple of nice Excel based stories from my time in Investment Banking.

Story 1: I Inherited a system once that had 1000s (yes thousands) of excel spreadsheets checked into SourceSafe (yes Source Safe) each sheet represented an Equity Derivatives trade, which was checked out and used by traders when pricing a deal. Also...now it gets fun...there were common functions for calculating the present value and risk metrics for each trade...so when we needed to calculate the risk the traders were running (intraday and end of day) we had a huge compute grid that would check the spreadsheets out and run them on virtualized windows boxes and sum the results to produce the official risk metrics for the bank's trading desk. Absolutely not making that up. I should really write a blog about it...it's truely terrifying.

Story 2: What if I told you that Excel has this little know function called RTD (real time data) that let's you stream data into sheets in well....real time. So you can see all your prices ticking away without refreshing the sheet. I also took over a system that had hundrends of sheets that did this (at this point you must be thinking this guy is a sucker for punishment) one of the problems here was latency...so each trader's sheet used their local machine to get prices...and the analytics library we used to calculate prices to an 'indeterminant' amount of time to execute. Oh...and one of the sheets published the banks prices out to Bloomberg...for trading. This whole mess was sorted out by eventually pricing everything centrally and pushing consistent numbers to bloomberg, the spreadsheets and the risk systems.

My overall summary is that excel is "what is dead but may never die" and you'd better embrace it if you want to deal with front office systems. That and I think people would be surprised to see how much systemic risk some of these places are running (i'm talking about a Top 15 bank here).

I sort of came to love it as a tool, but that's what people with Stockholm syndrome say right?

[osullivj]

Story 1 sounds totally nuts, but Story 2 is a common setup in my experience. Using Bloomberg prices on the desktop is a lot cheaper than BPipe - the server side solution for BBG market data. And quoting indicative prices on BBG from Excel is common too. An interesting new startup that I follow - pricingmonkey.com - is doing BBG driven IRD pricing in the browser with an IR pricing library written totally in JS. There are more details on my blog at etrading.wordpress.com

[MrMattWright]

Yep, that was pretty much it. Price wars over BPipe vs Retuers. "You mean I have to pay twice? Once for my desktop and once for this BPipe thing, and that costs whhhhhaaat? How much?" Also it's not quite as terrifying as firm live pricing, it's only indicative with a good Bid/Offer spread. Enjoyed your blog....I like the Pricing Monkey idea. Would they be picking up the prices from the local machine though? Because surely any other way would mean the same large fees?

[osullivj]

Thanks for the kind words on the blog. Yes - PricingMonkey gets the prices via the BBG API. The dev told me he'd coded it in Python.