BUSINESS REFLECTION: After the Bell: Who will win RWC 2023? Fortunately, financial analysts know — sort of

What is the one thing financial analysts and traders do really, really well? It’s obvious. Excel. Not in the sense of excelling at, you know, stock-picking, for example, more’s the pity. Excel in the sense of Microsoft Excel.

There’s a very funny Twitter comedian, Alexis Gay, who operates under the handle @yayalexisgay. She does a great skit as the pretend girlfriend of a financial analyst/trader, although she doesn’t know what he spends his day actually doing. “They pay him an amount of money that sounds fake … but it’s real. One time, they took some of it back! That was crazy.”

What she does know is two things: First, he has “so many monitors”. Even worse, “one’s vertical”, she says. “He just takes data from the Bloomberg terminal and puts it into Microsoft Excel, and I’m like, now you are just making up reasons to have so many screens”. Second, she concludes, “The man really crushes Excel, and not just Vlookup”.

And I’m afraid, this is how people see those operating in the financial sector: a little bit obsessed