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Yes, and reading reports.

They manually scan financial reports for info so they can manually type them into excel, and manually run various formulas and ultimately past the charts into powerpoint so they can fill up a directory full of files that hardly anyone will read.

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So it's like working in the middle office of a normal high street bank, but managed by psychopaths rather than depressives?

Why dont they automate it? Image (text) recognition is a solved problem.

I thought the same thing when I was watching a friend do this work at 2 AM on a Friday night. Then I realized it doesn’t cost the investment bank a single penny to ask an analyst to spend his weekend doing cut and paste work, whereas automating the process would cost something.

The analyst will still work till 3 am, but will do 3x more spreadsheets. For the same pay.

it is really not a solved problem

Reading standard financial forms isn't a solved problem?

Worked on bank to bank middleman software. There is no 'standard' form.

And probably the big investment firms want to keep it that way, because they can exploit humans to do this work. While their smaller competition can't.

How complicated are those forms? It sounds like GS would pay a lot for a software that converts 95% of the data into excel spreadsheets.

Tell me about it

...guy working on doing just that

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