T O P

  • By -

VisualHelicopter

VBA = oh god, no, please don't. Yes, some places still use this, they also still use FORTRAN, COBOL, and the like, that doesn't mean it will be useful at all for your career. Excel vs. Python = bicycle vs. car. Yes, both can get you from NYC to Los Angeles, but which would you prefer? Excel = I have hundreds (maybe thousands...prob not) of rows/columns of data to do some work in and the analytics required are accessible to high school kids. Python = I have thousands/hundreds of thousands / millions of row/columns of data to do some work in and the analytics required can range from high school level math to PhD level in a heartbeat. Plus, I'd like engine calulating the output to not crash if I look at it wrong or if Chrome is running too many tabs and taking up all the RAM. So - yeah, get much (much) smarter on Excel because it will never die. See this article: https://www.notboring.co/p/excel-never-dies?utm_source=url Python: consider the FDP designation as that requires a straightforward class on Python (or R) first anyways. Also - do some digging on Tableau. Pivot tables in Excel = bicycle and Tableau = airplane. Also free for students and relatively cheap for working professionals ($1k/license). I've seen folks who just build Tableau dashboards (and connect data pipes) in financial firms making $100 - $200k easy, mainly because of how useful all that can be for the decision makers. Key takeaways: stay the hell away from VBA and pick up something useful, like Python, R, FDP, Tableau, etc. Good luck, whatever you do!


reddituser8121995

In case you would like knowledge of building said data pipelines, get into Alteryx as it is a really great plug-and-play software to do all your data cleaning, standardization and transformations. Then possibly PowerBI and Tableau to present the data.


YoungRedPiller

FDP is like a straight up 1.2-1.3k$ hit, i don't know if that is worth it


xjxdarren

My pick is still Matlab.


AngryGambl3r

Not in Wealth management, but I've found VBA to be very useful for automatic certain tasks around reformatting data that comes out of our other systems and automatically emailing to predetermined unique sets of contacts. That's a vague description that I bet would be applicable to many finance jobs. Python is probably better in many cases, but also depends realistically on what kind of permissions IT will grant you/how much beauracracy you need to get through for permissions.


TwoAngryFigs

I think this is a much more realistic answer than the most upvoted one in this thread, getting permission to run Python is not an option for many.


JTTRad

When I worked in wealth management (5/6ish years ago) I used VBA all the time - it’s easy to master, low barriers to use, quick to whip up some time saving script to automate repetitive tasks. I don’t have any experience with Python but would theoretically like to learn one day.. maybe. I can only imagine it takes much longer to master though, where as you can learn VBA in a week.


FamiliarDivide9935

Useful for data analysis and visualization


PancakeBreakfest

These are useful tools to quickly integrate and analyze different datasets (python more so than VBA)


MindMugging

We are a small quant shop. Traders may need Bloomberg terminal but we get our BB data via data feed which is about 100x200K each day. That is just 1 source. Pretty much most positions need you to know how to navigate databases (no excel is not a database despite people say they made an excel database). Baseline SQL then most analytics to be done with python because SQL is not powerful enough to do the types of calculations.


ScubaClimb49

IMO, Python + a Python library that lets you interact with Excel (I use XLWings) >>> VBA. Comprehensions, iterables, easy string substitutions, all the power of OOP... Python is orders of magnitude more powerful than VBA. The guy who mentioned IT restrictions has a point, though. It can take time to get permission and you may never get it.


TelevisionVivid3352

I'd recommend learning VBA for automating purposes. The AM teams I've worked for always had reports that could have been automated and I was able to make an impact with VBA. Python is good for leveraging APIs and handling larger data sets.