By Andrew Grigolyunovich, CFA, CFM, FMVA
Chairman of the Financial Modeling World Cup
Can you make an e-sport out of financial modeling? Can financial modeling be as exciting to watch as FIFA or Counter-Strike? Last week our team at FMWC organized a stream of a financial modeling battle between our last season’s 2 top stars – Diarmuid and Joseph. We have worked hard to bring it to the next level of quality and excitement, but things didn’t go as planned. Well, see it yourself, here is the link:
Our team has tested the setup well in advance and everything should have been working smoothly. But not on the event day! We’ve spent more time than needed onboarding the players and didn’t have enough time to double-check everything else. As a result, in the middle of the stream, we started getting messages that spectators can hear only me, not the other commentators. It was not possible to correct this on the go as Dim and Joseph have already started to solve the case.
So, we just went on with myself being the only spokesperson during the event. That was definitely the most intense hour of the year for me so far! What a misfortune, especially having a person of Danielle’s caliber as the other commentator. Anyway, Danielle, I admire your skills! I think you should really try being a mime artist as a hobby! Great performance! Later we were able to re-record some of the pieces so at the end of the day it turned out to be not that bad. And yes, financial modeling could be very exciting, especially if the winner is decided only by the means of 55 points out of 1000 available.
BTW, next month we are planning to have a similar battle of 8-10 people representing different countries and continents. Instead of showing participant screens through Zoom or Google meets, we rather plan to use Excel collaboration features to screencast what the guys are doing. Please let us know if you might be interested in taking part in an exhibition event like this one. Do you think we need another battle between star modelers or rather let’s see how do regular people model under pressure? Just leave a comment here and I or my colleagues might get in touch.
Finally, I’d like to ask for your ideas and suggestions for improvements to the format and to the broadcast (except for the sound 😊). Again, please leave a comment here – we’ll review them all together (I have a list of some nice ideas as well). Do you think that financial modeling should be spectator-friendly at all? Shall we rather continue to concentrate on our core FMWC competition?
P.S. The case and all the materials are available to download free of charge here: Sample Cases – Knowledge is Power
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