About 10 minutes into building his Excel model, Michael Jarman was stumped. The spreadsheet he had put together to simulate a battle between two warring armies was giving him all the wrong outputs, and the vertical formatting he had chosen for the model was throwing him way off course.
On a normal day at his job as the head of model development for a consultancy in Toronto, Jarman could just rework the sheet and run the calculations again. But this was the final round of the Financial Modeling World Cup Open, and the 30-minute time limit meant the clock was not on his side.
