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F1F9 live online training

F1F9 financial modelling courses now live and online

Our Live online tuition courses are typically delivered over 12 one-hour live, interactive sessions. We timetable them over a number of days to give you time to absorb and revisit the tutorials, undertake assignments and consume targeted video content. Your tutor teaches you as part of a small...
Financial modelling skills checklist

5 reasons to invest time in your basic Excel skills

I meet lots of people on F1F9 training courses who are looking to improve their financial modelling skills. Some have excellent knowledge and abilities when it comes to operating Excel: it is obvious that they have put in the practice. Others struggle. There are plenty of other skills-based activities in life where time spent acquiring the basics can open up endless possibilities - so here are five reasons why you should invest time in your basic Excel skills.
Financial modelling for renewables

Simplifying renewable energy models

While the news often paints a gloomy picture - the Amazon is burning and Germany is struggling to make the economic and social transition away from brown coal - there are plenty of reasons to cheer when one reads the degree to which renewables are providing ever more of world’s energy. This year, the UK has seen weeks where coal has played no part in the energy supply for the first time since 1882. In my eyes there’s an inherent beauty in renewables projects, a beauty drawn from their simplicity - the sun shines; the wind blows and from that we get energy. Conversely, we’ve come across financial models underpinning such projects whose complexity defies the very simplicity of what they are seeking to quantify. Read more...
Best practice financial modelling

Modelling best practice – actions speak louder than words

There’s no shortage of blogs, articles and opinion pieces on how we should go about building a financial model, but they only really scratch the surface and need some imagination to go from principles to practicality. That’s why we’ve put together an example model to share with anyone who’s interested in taking a look.
data modelling blog

Deliverable Management Information Systems

Why did substantive changes to the MS Excel spreadsheet end 20 years ago? Not even a simple tweak to the LOOKUP function to allow exact-match with a FALSE argument? That on its own would unify a batch of sub-optimal approaches available through all the alternatives, with INDEX/MATCH combinations...
Data Visualisation | F1F9

Charting new territories with FAST

In my experience making a good model requires you to spend time not modelling, but talking about it instead. With my immediate team, I can talk in front of the monitor with the model on it. But other project members do not talk in columns and rows; they prefer to talk with pictures. Pictures mean...
Average Internal Rate of Return

Average Internal Rate of Return (AIRR)

An introduction by F1F9: We were approached by Thierry Renard and Carlo Alberto Magni and were intrigued by what they had to say: a new approach to calculating an internal rate of return. What's more, they were illustrating the application of the Average Internal Rate of Return ("AIRR") using Excel...
Modelling Balances

How to Model Balances in Excel

There are two basic types of line item in financial models – flows and balances. Balances are amounts at a point in time. Balances can be financial or non financial. Every balance has similar properties. This blog explains what those properties are, and gives a standard model component that...