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Comment by georgespencer | Hacker News Reader

Hey! I'm a really big fan of this idea! Well done on tackling something really important.

I think the examples you've chosen are good but not great examples of where you can add significant value. A house being rented where there are a few variables and a good/better/best outcome is not especially gnarly Excel for the Hacker News audience. I think marketing and sales forecasts and stock option pricing and DCF might be more impactful, if more esoteric, in showing the power of what you're building.

BTW, it'd be cool to be able to anchor a variable to a historical base or average. So maybe if you have seven or eight forecasts of CAGR, Casual could accept 'citations' and in its output show a user of the model that this isn't totally speculative.

Love what you're doing and have signed up. Well done again.

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Thanks - glad you like the idea!

You’re totally right that these aren’t the best examples to show the real value of the approach. We wanted to keep things super simple to start getting feedback, but are working on a more involved example now. DCF valuations and options pricing sound like great ideas – will look into them!

What do you mean re: citations? Validating Causal models using forecasts from other means?

In forecasting folks will often use external data. For example let's say you have six different estimates on the growth potential of a market from six external reports. It'd be cool to be able to specify that a range of assumptions have citations. At the moment folks do this using accompanying appendices to financial models, which is pretty gross.

Ahh gotcha — yes that makes a lot of sense! Would love to chat to you more about this stuff - will email you :)

Taimur - Congrats and I signed up as well.

To me, one of the advantages of representing the story in a probabilistic way, similar to how you have shown it, is that I am able to sell an idea to my audience.

If you are looking for use cases to build for a demo, in addition to DCF, as someone suggested before, you might want to consider currency movements and also IRR calculations.

One feature request, if I may, is the ability to manipulate the end result (time horizon in the demo of rent vs buy) and see how it impacts one of the features (rent, market return, etc).

All the best and glad to discuss.

Thanks, will email you!

I completely second the Marketing part, it is full of spreadsheets of hell

Signed up, curious to see how the sausage is made.

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