>An awful lot of finance (that used to run in Excel) is just side-effect free, compute-centric transformations over data
true dat.
For example, in Excel, checkout PV ( Click on Formulas->Financial->PV )
Given a $1K@par 10Y bond paying $50 annual coupon at 2% interest, Excel says the Present Value (PV) of the bond must be $1269.48
Getting rid of the fold produces the list of discounted coupons and the discounted principal...just a trivial teaser example, but most quants look at that & go, wow if you could do all that in 1 line, imagine the possibilities if you are pricing a mortgage with tranches...you could get rid of 4 page spreadsheets & replace with a paragraph of straight math & it would just work...and they'd be right, too.
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>An awful lot of finance (that used to run in Excel) is just side-effect free, compute-centric transformations over data
true dat. For example, in Excel, checkout PV ( Click on Formulas->Financial->PV ) Given a $1K@par 10Y bond paying $50 annual coupon at 2% interest, Excel says the Present Value (PV) of the bond must be $1269.48
Getting rid of the fold produces the list of discounted coupons and the discounted principal...just a trivial teaser example, but most quants look at that & go, wow if you could do all that in 1 line, imagine the possibilities if you are pricing a mortgage with tranches...you could get rid of 4 page spreadsheets & replace with a paragraph of straight math & it would just work...and they'd be right, too.