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Show HN: Quantus – LeetCode for Financial Modeling

by misstercool on 12/12/24, 12:04 PM with 50 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.

  • by itissid on 12/12/24, 4:42 PM

    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.

  • by aiden3 on 12/12/24, 11:32 PM

    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.

  • by iknownthing on 12/12/24, 3:41 PM

    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?

  • by westurner on 12/12/24, 2:53 PM

    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...

  • by stonlyb on 12/12/24, 5:50 PM

    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.

  • by jbs789 on 12/12/24, 3:44 PM

    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.

  • by jbs789 on 12/12/24, 6:07 PM

    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?

  • by mclau156 on 12/12/24, 4:55 PM

    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?

  • by s0rr0wskill on 12/12/24, 6:11 PM

    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?

  • by curious_cat_163 on 12/12/24, 7:22 PM

    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? :)

  • by noleary on 12/12/24, 6:04 PM

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

    This is really awesome

  • by josh_carterPDX on 12/12/24, 5:17 PM

    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!

  • by coffeecantcode on 12/12/24, 3:09 PM

    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.

  • by hperpkl on 12/13/24, 7:40 PM

    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

  • by matt3210 on 12/12/24, 5:10 PM

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

  • by jalcazar on 12/12/24, 11:03 PM

    Looks like something I want to use.

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

  • by jkcchan on 12/12/24, 3:47 PM

    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!

  • by edweis on 12/12/24, 2:58 PM

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

  • by 101008 on 12/12/24, 4:54 PM

    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.

  • by mdrzn on 12/12/24, 3:48 PM

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

  • by headelf on 12/12/24, 7:01 PM

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

  • by daneyh on 12/13/24, 4:16 AM

    'failed to fetch' when trying to sign up.

  • by StarlaAtNight on 12/12/24, 1:55 PM

    Love this! Will try it out

  • by fHr on 12/12/24, 5:16 PM

    Cool, will try this out!