However the excel solution has a lot of things going for it :<p>1) applications&#x2F;reports built by the people designing and understanding the underlying needs and inner workings of whatever they&#x27;re offering. Whilst very good programmers can match this (given enough - that&#x27;s a lot - time), average programmers won&#x27;t even try.<p>2) excel sheets require nowhere near the manpower required for your alternative. That factors into a cost-benefit analysis that may not favor real development.<p>3) Speed of development. Markets change. Investments change. Sometimes literally in minutes. Anything involving more than 1-2 people who are intimately involved in the strategy itself cannot possibly keep up.<p>4) Excel is in fact a pure functional programming language [1]. Unless you deeply understand excel I wouldn&#x27;t be so quick to call it stupid. There are entire classes of bugs that simply can&#x27;t exist in excel spreadsheets that are regularly found in programs.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ndc-london.com&#x2F;talk&#x2F;pure-functional-programming-in-excel&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;ndc-london.com&#x2F;talk&#x2F;pure-functional-programming-in-ex...</a><p>These sheets are pretty good. You can really get nice app ideas from some of them: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.exinfm.com&#x2F;free_spreadsheets.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.exinfm.com&#x2F;free_spreadsheets.html</a>