The GoldSim Financial (FN) Module is a add-on extension to GoldSim that allows you to probabilistically simulate financial systems that include components such as accounts and funds, investments, options, projects or undertakings with specified cash flows, and insurance policies. By combining the specialized financial elements in the Financial Module with GoldSim's underlying probabilistic, dynamic simulation framework, you can quickly simulate and analyze complex financial systems, as well as complex engineering and business systems that have a financial component.

The Financial Module makes it easy to probabilistically model financial instruments, activities and processes such as:

• funds and accounts with specified deposits, withdrawals, interest rates, and compounding periods;
• future returns (in terms of NPV and IRR) of projects, business ventures, and similar undertakings;
• future returns of portfolios of investments, accounting for volatility and uncertainty;
• the acquisition and exercise of financial options (puts and calls); and
• insurance policies.

Why Use GoldSim for Financial Modeling Instead of a Spreadsheet?

Most financial models today are built using spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are relatively inexpensive and most analysts are comfortable with using them. In addition, numerous macros and add-ons are available to enhance spreadsheets (e.g., tools to enable Monte Carlo simulation within a spreadsheet). So it is natural to ask, "Why can't I just use a spreadsheet for my financial models? What are the advantages of using GoldSim?"

Although spreadsheets are very useful for accounting tasks and managing lists of items, they have significant weaknesses when used for quantitative modeling tasks, such as analyzing and forecasting the performance of a business or investment portfolio. GoldSim specifically addresses these weaknesses and provides a powerful and flexible improvement over spreadsheets for building quantitative financial models. In addition, because GoldSim can link seamlessly to spreadsheets, you can still use them as databases for inputs and outputs, and even as subroutines for specialized calculations.

Learn More

• To learn more about GoldSim and the Financial Module, take the Financial Module Quick Tour. This is a 10 minute animated demo that walks through the key features and capabilities of the Financial Module.
• To learn more about how GoldSim provides a significant improvement over spreadsheets for complex financial modeling applications, read a more detailed description of how GoldSim moves beyond spreadsheets.