People do all this work and cannot beat index funds?
I am not in the industry but I have a pretty significant portfolio in stocks and I do all kinds of option trades etc. I was trying to imagine, for example, what would the WMT forecast tab in your spreadsheet tell me and I have no idea what the message is - should I be buying the stock, selling the stock or what - no idea. So somehow all this work, I would think, has to end up relating to the client needs - e.g. you made x% last year and your portfolio is expected to make y% this year or something. I think you would benefit from taking some formal courses to have a complete picture - this way, not only you have the tools, but also the knowledge of how this output gets used. Plus the course bolsters your resume. If anybody could do some research on the web and put together a spreadsheet in 2 weeks and are aiming for what I would think would be a 60K+ job, why the hell are there people formally going to college and wasting 4-years of their life and lot of money on college expenses - they should just quit and work on this stuff.
Did you do this work in Excel? Seems like writing a computer program would make this so much easier. Give the program a few parameters and it will happily crank out everything. I would be surprised too if big investment houses don’t have programs to churn out reams of this kind of data. So I don’t think the employment value is in being able to create this data - but it has to be in how to interpret this data and do some what-if analysis.
BTW - the reason that I got interested in looking at the spreadsheet is because I do have a real need that is a lot more practical. The practical need is for some software to track my positions and based on the current date and price, give me some suggestions. As a simplest example, it could look at a stock in my positions and say - “hey - this is down 15% - do you want to continue to hold or get out of it and cut your losses”. Another example would be to take a look at my loss position and before the year is up, remind me - hey, we are within x-days of crossing a one year boundary - if you sell it now, you will get short term losses. And the reverse - “should I sell this?” - no - wait for 2 more weeks and then you would have LT gains. When looking at 3-5 stocks, no need for any of this - but when you have a normal account, IRA and Roth accounts for you and your wife - some of them with 20 different stock positions, then it becomes a bit hard to manage it all on a regular basis.