What are the skills financial modellers need?
At a minimum:
- Logical deduction
- Common sense
- Lateral thinking
- Creativity
- Attention to detail
- Pattern recognition
- Adaptability
- Patience
And what is the best way to test these?
Some may give a potential modeller an Excel test, but my recommendation at a financial modeller’s interview would be to present some puzzles from Alex Bellos’s The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book.
My middle daughter gave me this for Christmas and I am loving grappling with such delights as the Malagasy counting system, tribal family trees, cuneiform and Cistercian notation. Plus learning so much about the world, including the background to the evolution of the alphabet, numerical notation and AI.
Why is a puzzle book on languages of relevance to financial modellers? Well, Excel is simply another language and financial models are large puzzles, sometimes solved more efficiently than others.
The solutions, when reached, are so satisfying. It is the same feeling as finding a neat solution to a tricky financial modelling problem.
Thank you, Alex Bellos, this book is simply perfect and far better than any Excel test.