By Andrew Webb and David Little

TechHackers was founded by Atul Jain and Michael How in 1986. The company's spreadsheet product, @nalyst, consists of six principal add-in libraries: Financial @nalyst, Bond @nalyst, Options @nalyst, MBS @nalyst, Exotics @nalyst and Swap @nalyst. As the titles imply, the products are mostly aimed at specific underlying markets. The exception is Financial @nalyst, which is suited to utilities for such functions as NPV, IRR, date arithmetic and business day calculations. The products are in use with some 3,000 institutions worldwide and are supposed by offices in New York and London. The analytics in the package are also available as QuantTools, C/C++ callable object libraries. The @nalyst range provides a total of more than 200 functions that can be run in either Excel or Applix.

Little: The main selling point of TechHackers' @nalyst package is its extensive market coverage, especially in fixed income. If you are buying a code library for a floor with multiple desks that focus on fixed-income areas, this is the one to choose.

The product has MBS, swaps, international EMG bonds, exotics of all types, a base set of core functionality that will be shared by all, and a great generic cash-flow manipulation/modeling module. The package is ideal for the enterprise that will be supported by a technical infrastructure but is smart enough not to build its own code. The documentation is extensive and covers everything you need to use the product (including numerous examples), and is available both in print and on-line. The functions are not designed to be that easy to use; I found that you could get lost in the code, because the parameters are complex and have no real design sensibility. TechHackers has made this a lot easier with helpful wizards that set most of the things up for you, but still, when you have to get down into it, you might find yourself squinting at the screen, counting commas and underlining examples in the book. Overall, the package is strong, will do most of the things you need a library code for, and covers almost the entire capital markets trading world. The only hitch is that TechHackers makes you pay for each different type of exotics option set. Why not stick them all together and raise the price? No one who trades path-dependent options makes a decision on code libraries based on the money.