RPN and Calculators

[Greenman72]

@PalacioHill

… plus the calculator looked so quality.

Nothing gets you laid quicker than the HP-12C. Especially the platinum edition.

[PalacioHill]

^word

[system]

@Greenman72

Palacios and I disagree on something.

He says that RPN is a wonderful weapon to have in your arsenal, and thinks the HP-12C is a superior calculator to the BA2+. He recommends that everybody learn RPN (and get the 12C) because it’s faster and easier.

I say that there’s no reason to learn RPN because in “real” life, once you get a “real” job, you’ll either use Excel or canned software, not your calculator. So learning RPN is useless (which would make the 12C useless as well).

Anybody here who works in the industry have an opinion?

Seriously dude, how do you make up this stuff? When I was working in investments everyone had a 12-c on their desk. I even worked at a few companies where they gave them to you for free.

Walk around a trading floor or a bond department and see if your theory holds. Oh I forgot you have never worked a day in investments in your entire life.

[Greenman72]

Bump.

S2000–what’s your take on this? Which one do you use? When people ask you which one, what do you tell them? Do you tell students something different than you tell professionals?

[Turd_Fergeson]

I use a 12c about 10x more per day than excel. It’s far more efficient for doing back of the envelope calcs when evaluating new investments. Not sure about other asset classes, but in mine there are only a handful of metrics you need to calculate when deciding if an investment is worth spending due diligence time on. 12 c is far more efficient for this. And you can rough out an IRR in your head or on your 12c so excel is pretty useless until you do a full underwriting.

[rawraw]

@Turd_Fergeson

I use a 12c about 10x more per day than excel. It’s far more efficient for doing back of the envelope calcs when evaluating new investments. Not sure about other asset classes, but in mine there are only a handful of metrics you need to calculate when deciding if an investment is worth spending due diligence time on. 12 c is far more efficient for this. And you can rough out an IRR in your head or on your 12c so excel is pretty useless until you do a full underwriting.

Just means you haven’t yet built a Excel template to easily evaluate new securities (perferably automatically feeding from somewhere). But yea, I see your point

[Kan-yeezy]

@Turd_Fergeson

It’s far more efficient for doing back of the envelope calcs when evaluating new investments.

+1

I’m the only person I know of in my age group that uses the 12C but I do use it all the time. In fact I just used it 5 mins ago to crunch some numbers for my dad.

And the learning curve isn’t exactly steep. A few hours and you should be fine; it’s pretty intuitive after all. The only problem now is that I have difficulty using Algebraic calculators…I always punch keys in the wrong order

[S2000magician]

@Greenman72

Bump.

S2000–what’s your take on this? Which one do you use? When people ask you which one, what do you tell them? Do you tell students something different than you tell professionals?

I use an HP 12-C.

(If you infer anything from that, you’re probably wrong.)

Years ago I taught a class in cash flow analysis (first class for CFP aspirants). The textbook I used – written by one of the faculty at the university where I was teaching – was good in many ways (it covered a lot of topics that you cannot find together in any other single textbook), and awful in many ways (lots of bizarre mistakes, which remained in the next edition even after I discussed them with the author). The book was written around the HP 12-C: all of the examples used that calculator. So, I bought it to be able to teach the class.

When people ask me which calculator they should use, I ask them if they already have a calculator. If so, I tell them to use that one, whatever it is. If not, I suggest the TI, as I prefer algebraic notation to RPN, and I think more people are accustomed to algebraic notation.

In point of fact, I see little difference in efficiency or ease of use between the two.

One of these days I need to buy a TI just so that when I get questions like this one:

http://www.analystforum.com/forums/cfa-forums/cfa-level-i-forum/91325072

I can tell them exactly which button has the natural logarithm function.