Hedging myth III - "We can run our hedge book in Excel."

Sisyphus was a Greek king who was punished by the gods for his deceit and defiance, including tricking Death and testing his wife’s loyalty. His eternal punishment was to push a massive boulder up a mountain, only to watch it roll back down each time he neared the summit, forcing him to repeat the task, forever. This endless, futile labor gave rise to the term “Sisyphean”, describing tasks that are laborious, repetitive, and seemingly impossible to complete.

A bit like the feeling when running hedging and hedge accounting in a spreadsheet.

The dreaded month-end close. Have to rebuild the roll-forward, paste and vlookup the valuations, re-test effectiveness. Discover a broken link in tab 14, reconcile to the bank, try fix the formula someone pasted over. Triple check and finally send. Then do it all again next month.

The boulder never stays at the top. The workbook is never finished, and the only person who understands it is on annual leave.

A spreadsheet doesn't fail with a bang. It fails quietly; death by a thousand cuts - a stale rate, a hard copied formula, a mis-entered deal, a version saved as ‘Final_v17b_Really_Really_Final’.

Hedging itself isn't the punishment - doing it by hand, is. Stop pushing the spreadsheet uphill and use a proper platform.

We hope you are enjoying our series where Greek myths meet treasury myths.

Can you match the hero to the next myth “Hedging is only for large companies”? Click here to discover who can help us dispel this myth.