Show HN: Quantus – LeetCode for Financial Modeling | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Quantus – LeetCode for Financial Modeling

quantus.finance

279 pointsmisstercool50 comments

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share Quantus, a finance learning and practice platform I’m building out of my own frustration with traditional resources.

As a dual major in engineering and finance who started my career at a hedge fund, I found it challenging to develop hands-on financial modeling skills using existing tools. Platforms like Coursera, Udemy, Corporate Finance Institute (CFI), and Wall Street Prep (WSP) primarily rely on video-based tutorials. While informative, these formats often lack the dynamic, interactive, and repetitive practice necessary to build real expertise.

For example, the learning process often involves:

- Replaying videos multiple times to grasp key concepts.

- Constantly switching between tutorials and Excel files.

- Dealing with occasional discrepancies between tutorial numbers and the provided Excel materials.

To solve these problems, I created Quantus—an interactive platform where users can learn finance by trying out formulas or building financial models directly in an Excel-like environment. Inspired by LeetCode, the content is organized into three levels—easy, medium, and hard—making it accessible for beginners while still challenging for advanced users.

Our growing library of examples includes:

- 3-statement financial models

- Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) analysis

- Leveraged Buyouts (LBO)

- Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A)

Here’s a demo video to showcase the platform in action. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDRNHgBERLQ

I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback! Let me know what other features or examples you’d find useful.

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Great work on the tool. Looks really useful for basic modeling for a businesses who need this.

As a salaried person I would like to see a version of this tool for planning ones own portfolios.

0. Set your risk parameters: Maximum drawdown, expected returns, time horizon, fixed income needed, broker platform etc.

1. Pick ETFs from a specific brokerage that match and find different kinds of ETFs for different asset classes, different startegies(US, ex-US, Currency Hedged, Buffer, Bullet Shares).

2. Tools: Rebalancer, be able to find what ETFs are cheap/expensive based on current evaluations(P/E) and Historical data. Like when fed is raising rates one can invest more in Bond Funds(like Bullet Share) that lock in that yield incrementally and vice versa.

I love this idea, this is really cool. I work on a joint data/business team and this would be useful for us. One piece of technical feedback: it would be good if you could press = and then use the arrow keys to select parts of your formula (like in excel). With quantus, I need to press =, and then switch to my mouse, and then click the cell (for example EBITDA), then press '/' on my keyboard, then go back to my mouse to select revenue, and then finally press equal, and then submit the assignment.

You should also make the tutorials/mini assignments slightly harder. Its really easy to calculate EBITDA margin when there are 2 lines on the page: revenue and EBITDA. It would be better if there were a few red herrings (like in a real financial statement/operating model). It would be even better if there were some harder stages where someone needs to first calculate EBITDA through the income statement, and then EBITDA margin.

Final piece of feedback: the various mini assignments in a module should all operate off of the same broader set of tabs/excel sheet. It would be rewarding to keep filling out more and more of the broader model, and also to have the context of the entire financial model available at any given time.

Happy to chat more. I would like to add something like this to my team's employee onboarding / training process.

A few more points of random feedback as I spend more time with it:

- In my wide monitor, the circle on the dark circle on the left that is supposed to be the background to the white descriptive text does not scale at the same rate as the text.. Which means that I can't read the right hand side of the text when opening the page wider than half of my screen (microsoft edge).

- Not a fan of the 3d birds on every page, sorry. If there needs to be birds, I prefer the birds on the homepage to the AI-generated looking ones on the /learn/module pages.

- Would be great to have 5+ LBO model building exercises for different business types/different formats.

- I don't know if this works in Google Sheets, but it would be good to have an exercise where people build a sensitivity table.

- An exercise where someone had to go to the investor relations website of a particular company, download a historical 10Q, seek out information from the income statement or balance sheet, and then calculate a metric or ratio would be excellent. (i.e,. something that brings you out of the context of Quantus/the in browser spreadsheet, but trains more on the actual action of seeking and using public filing data).

- I haven't been through everything, so you may already have it, but a double entry accounting exercise would be interesting. I find that people who haven't taken accounting courses in the past sometimes struggle with how the 3 statements fit together.

- Adding the hotkey on the top my priority list.

- Agree with you on adding more challenging quizzes!

- Having the various mini assignments in a module on the same tab is an interesting idea.

- Regarding the bird lol, yea, I do plan to redesign the UI at some point to make it more professional look

- We are adding a few more LBO cases

- Sensitive table is a good idea

- Regarding your suggestion on auto-pulling finance data to build dynamic exercise, that is something I have been thinking about from the beginning.

- Double entry accounting is interesting! actually I have been considering building training materials to the offshore accounting firms.

Thank you so very much taking time playing around the tool and writing these thoughtful feedback! Really appreciate it!!

People generally use leetcode to prepare for interviews and learning is kind of a side-effect so I'm curious are these questions similar to those you would find in interviews (i.e. like leetcode) or is it more for general learning purposes?

The current stage of finance interview is a little bit like coding interview 20 years ago, pre-leetcode time, where you write sudo code on a paper to answer some coding challenges. The coding interview nowadays are quite advanced, I believe Leetcode plays huge role.

The best way of learning financial modeling is by doing it on the excel. Even though many finance technical interviews still focus on behavior type of questions, discussing your model-building approach and assumptions. By practising different scenarios on Excel, timeboxing it, it will help you refine your responses during the interview.

(may have been autocorrect, but just fyi "pseudocode")

oh...thanks, apologize for my typo

I give folks an excel test. It’s more of a very basic modeling test as I provide some data and tell them what I want from it and see how they get to the answer. They do it in our office on our PC and access to the internet for help.

I’ve been giving it to candidates for over 15 years now. And seen some awful stuff out of it. Some people just spend an hour building 14 different pivot tables and never write a formula. I think it’s very easy but only about 10% of people do well on it. It’s not meant to be tricky either, like one question is “write a SUMIFS on the data table to determine X, Y, Z” and you can tell most people fumble with giving the formula the correct parameters or in the right order. This is a major red flag for me as a Financial Analyst, even if they don’t use that formula often, should be able to understand the instructions Excel is giving you OR use a search engine to figure it out in just a couple minutes.

On the SUMIFS problem, we tell them exactly which formula to use because we noticed early on if we didn’t then people would just say they had no answer, or not sure how to approach the problem.

Worth noting, I only ever interview people with minimum 2 years actual work experience as a Financial Analyst (Also managers, directors, VPs. Everyone gets tested). Also, it’s become better over time. I think colleges are pushing excel literacy as part of the curriculum more than they used to.

“Thanks for interviewing with us at H&R Block. I’m sure you’ll be great at helping people file their Income Taxes. In the next 45 minutes, we would like you to examine this conference room full of Banker’s Boxes of records for a Fortune 500 company accused of financial wrongdoing. You must determine whether they are guilty or not, and if guilty, the nature and extent of their crime.”

How does your solution differ from JupyterHub + ottergrader or nbgrader? What about Kaggle Learn?

From taking the Udacity AI Programming in Python course, it looks like Udacity has a Jupyter Notebooks -based LMS LRS CMS platform.

How does your solution differ from the "Quant Platform" which hosts [Certificate in] "Python for Finance": https://home.tpq.io/pqp/

Do you award (OpenBadges) educational credentials as Blockcerts (W3C VC Verifiable Claims, W3C DIDs Decentralized Identifiers,) with blockchain-certificates/cert-issuer? https://github.com/blockchain-certificates/cert-issuer#how-b...

Our goal is to help users improve their finance and accounting knowledge. This includes acing job interviews and learning how to create different financial models for varied sectors. Currently, we have no plans to provide coding lessons or provide certificates.

So, no portfolio performance backtesting, and non-certified non-licensed financial planners creating index funds?

What are the next set of library additions you're planning? Will tune in for when you release something on VC term sheets, convertible note / SAFE note conversions, and Techno Economic Analysis.

love this idea!

This looks really technically impressive.

As someone who has worked in financial services for close to 20 years now, what I find interesting is how the experienced deal makers/traders/entrepreneurs have established mental models about how things work, then when evaluating a deal distill that down to a handful of reasons to do it (or not).

So the hard part is knowing what to focus on, which changes based on the environment and over time, rather than constructing the excel model.

Absolutely, the current platform is designed to help beginners and intermediate learners to hone their technical skills. I am considering expanding in areas such as allowing users to share their models and strategies. I understand it can be daunting for newcomers to an industry to figure out the best way to construct models. What are your thoughts on this?

In all seriousness, would this help me with something like CFA related certification? What other resources would you recommend to go along with Quantus?

These are always interesting to me bc people respond with suggestions for changes.

But what’s the authors overall objective? Is it to create a marketable product? For whom?

I have attempted to do financial modeling practice with ChatGPT and Claude, but they struggle to come up with interesting data needed to make any real insights, is this really just testing our knowledge of which business terms to use and which functions to use, or is there enough good data to require some ingenuity to gain insights from?

Yea, I might do more in depth AI integration in the future. The hint function has been the most popular one in assassinating users learning how to solve the financial modeling problems. This platform is designed with the goal of assisting users in enhancing their practical skills in financial modeling.

> The hint function has been the most popular one in assassinating users

That's the effect of LeetCode on the field of software development.

Who is the target audience for this?

As someone who has a CS background but would like to learn more about finance but not get too deep into the weeds of math & statistics, would this be a good resource? Or is this more for people who want to break into quant and practice/learn concepts for interviews?

Judging by the content this is probably for people interested in moving into investment banking.

Doesn’t look like stats or advanced math is a major prerequisite.

Yep, no stats or advanced math is needed. My primary focus is to cater to beginner and intermediate users.

For beginners, it is a good tool to understand the basic finance and accounting concepts. It is interactive, you can practice the formulas via quizzes, much more fun than reading a textbook. I suggest you try financial statement module.

For intermediate users, you can practice financial modeling by solving generic modeling problems (3-statements, DCF, LBO, M&A). It will help you build the muscle memory of using the functions/formulas.

For advanced users, I am planning to onboard more industry specific modeling content and practice cases.

Just signed up. Would be cool to learn about Derivates!

I have an earnest question and I reckon you might have given it some thought. Is teaching financial modeling to humans a growing market? If so, why do you think that?

If you think not, is the idea here to test this space for a product that comes down the road? :)

Brings me back to my many evenings and weekends spent poring over Breaking into Wall Street PDFs :)

This is really awesome

+1, so true!

Thank you for building something like this. Financial modeling can be daunting, but I think it's the most important tool for entrepreneurs to have in order to understand how best to run their business. Can't wait to spend some time playing with this tool!

Just signed up, really looking forward to sharpening my financial modeling skills, even after graduating and moving into a field where I don’t do that sort of thing anymore.

Any plans to create a native mobile application? I couldn’t seem to find one on the App Store.

That's an excellent query! Many have asked for a mobile app. Right now, we're improving the desktop version as Excel works best on it. Making Excel easy to use on a mobile app isn't easy. Our plan is to first make a mobile app centered around finance quizzes and concepts. Then, we'll aim to provide a complete Excel experience for financial modeling on mobile.

The mobile spreadsheet problem is definitely a hurdle, I think finance quizzes would be great to have on the go as a supplemental education piece.

Breaking down the formulas that work in certain situations or how certain modeling strategies are implemented conceptually could also lend well to a mobile platform without also requiring a “mobile spreadsheet” approach, which in all honesty sounds like a nightmare development process.

Either way, love the platform and wishing you all the best!

great suggestions, thanks!

I'd like to use it internally as our non-fund is investable and participates across multiple asset classes and is flexible in a way to use financial instruments, so this would be helpful

Well… there goes a few weekends of my life wasted. Thanks

Looks like something I want to use.

Would this help me preparing to [aspirationally] compete in the FMWC (Financial Modeling World Cup) ?

really cool, very slick. the beginner content feels very AI gen'd, which isn't necessarily a problem. my eyes are conditioned to glaze over this type of content, so maybe my issue haha. but i really like the concept, and agree there's a huge gap in the landscape for a tool like this, so great work!

Sure! While beginner content isn't unique, chatGPT can handle such questions effectively. Our main aim is to create a mind map that helps users understand concepts deeply and apply them to build various financial models.

Great interface. I love the fact we can use Google Sheet to do the math.

thanks! IMO, excel spreadsheet is like the compiler for finance folks, there is no better way to learning and practising finance on this interface.

This looks amazing and one of the things I'd love to try if I'd have infinite time*

* Not that I use my time wisely, but lately I feel very tired when I am on my free/own time, so I don't want to do anything that would require concentration.

Looks interesting! Is it free? I don't see any pricing page.

Isn't the purpose of AI so I don't have to learn this?

Just my personal opinion, feel free to disagree ;). There are few issues preventing finance being replaced by AI.

1. The large portion of finance is customization. AI works on the simple models, but it may struggle to perform adequately with complex, company-specific situations. Take pilot as example, it is an accounting and bookkeeping company with the combination of tech solution and human services. There is always human in the loop.

2. Finance deals with the numbers, the bar of accuracy is very high.

However, I believe AI can make learning finance much simpler, that is why I build this platform.

Rest assured that the prevalence of AI means these skills will be even more important somehow. AI just made writing and coding skills even more important, not less, and I'd imagine the same will be true of finance and accounting.

'failed to fetch' when trying to sign up.

would mind try it again?

Love this! Will try it out

Thank you!

Cool, will try this out!

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