Why Should You Attend "Advanced Financial Modelling" Masterclass Series?

Take a look at the World around and you will notice it is not a 'World' but a 'Globalised World', a single, intensely competitive market-place. As the traditional World has changed, so have traditional tools of decision-making: spreadsheets, financial calculators, memos, research reports, telephone calls and so on, once the main-stay of decision-making, are inadequate by themselves for competing in the globalised world. Before you can take a decision, you need to first capture the situation you are facing, by preparing a 'clay model' of the situation, with a view to examining its dimensions closely. Thus, you need the 'next generation' tools to stay competitive in the market place: the capability to build Models that enable you to take Smart Decisions. 4-Ingredients are required for building a model: knowledge of 'advanced' aspects of Excel, knowledge of a programming language to manipulate Excel (VBA), familiarity with Modelling Concepts and exposure to real-life models. This programme exposes you to all of these.

Let me alert you to a basic fact: Financial Modelling is not confined to the area of finance; model building as taught in this programme, applies to all functional areas: marketing, human resources, treasury, accounting, laboratory trials, astronomy, physics, engineering, statistics, economics, and so on: the list is endless.

For example, 'Human Resources' could be interested in a model to forecast the number of employees to hire during a year given growth in business, salary levels, retirements, number of universities, expected turnover in a year, and so on. A 'Chemical Laboratory' may be interested in forecasting the success rate of a new drug on the basis of large-scale experiments. A 'Marketing Department' could be interested in identifying the optimum marketing channels based on past indicators. Thus, Financial Modelling is a framework to 'encapsulate' a situation, regardless of functional area, by decomposing a situation into its constituent variables, identifying the relationships amongst variables and transferring these to a modelling eco-system built with Excel VBA. The modelling framework is the same whether it is a budget, a model to examine the movements of planets, an option pricing model, a model to predict pollution in a city, or an econometric model for developing tax policies.

While Excel offers many tools to a build a Financial Model, powerful models can be built ONLY with knowledge of advanced features of Excel and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) . This programme devotes time to 'advanced' features of Excel and a full day to 'VBA'. Armed with this knowledge, participants examine several real-life models on the last day of the programme.

This programme is very different from other programmes:

1. Firstly, this programme is not about learning the subject of 'Finance'; rather it is about learning the tools and techniques of model building (we use many examples from the world of finance).
2. Secondly, unlike other programmes, this programme makes a very definitive statement: it is NOT possible to build powerful models with Excel alone - VBA is an essential component and participants need to master VBA - the ability to record a macro is not a substitute for learning VBA - macros (which are typically recorded and lack decision-making and looping structures) are 'band-aids' - VBA is a full-blow programming language.