Challenge
Finding the right solution for accuracy and customization with speed
CAM Capital is a private investment company based in New York City. CAM was founded in 2012 by Bruce Kovner following his retirement from Caxton Associates, the macro hedge fund he founded and managed from 1983 to 2011. CAM manages capital exclusively for entities related to Mr. Kovner and its senior employees, and engages in both direct investing as well as manager selection across a wide variety of asset classes.
CAM initially used Excel for much of its data aggregation, analysis and reporting, which proved too cumbersome for customization and speed. For the firm’s Chairman and its Chief Investment Officer, Excel simply wasn’t enough. With the help of Yuriy Shteinbuk, a member of the investment team, and accounting manager Amy Rupinski, the Company looked for other alternatives.
Quickly customizing reports was an especially convoluted process; altering a single number caused a chain reaction of addendums spanning multiple reports. “It became incredibly difficult. You could see loops of five to ten different worksheets linked to each other. So for a minor change, you could be modifying multiple Excel spreadsheets, which could easily lead to large mistakes,” Mr. Shteinbuk says.
Drilling into the data to find specific information proved even more time-consuming. Both the accounting and investment teams were feeling this pain. “We get a lot of requests for different subsets of data,” Ms. Rupinski adds. “In Excel, that’s very difficult if you’re tracking everything on an entity level.”
“The reports were static. To see any updates, we’d have to ask Amy’s team to make changes to a bunch of spreadsheets, which you can imagine is extremely complicated and convoluted when you have many nested entities,” Mr. Shteinbuk explains. “The process of getting answers became time-consuming and messy.”