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.
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.
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.
- 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.
- 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!!
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.
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.
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...
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.
But what’s the authors overall objective? Is it to create a marketable product? For whom?
That's the effect of LeetCode on the field of software development.
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?
Doesn’t look like stats or advanced math is a major prerequisite.
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.
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? :)
This is really awesome
Any plans to create a native mobile application? I couldn’t seem to find one on the App Store.
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!
Would this help me preparing to [aspirationally] compete in the FMWC (Financial Modeling World Cup) ?
* 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.
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.
