Neuvottelija + · Tools · first published 2026-02-05
Claude in Excel | Sami Miettinen | Negotiator +
A practical guide to Claude in Excel as an investor's tool. Sami Miettinen converts his Finnish equity savings account from Nordnet's portfolio view into a spreadsheet and then computes the key relative valuation figures: EV/EBITDA, EV/Sales and EV/Capital Employed. Along the way it covers exchange rates, estimating acquisition costs, the role of external data sources, and what high multiples in a portfolio actually mean. Not investment advice.
Claude in Excel | Sami Miettinen | Negotiator +
Summary: A practical guide to Claude in Excel as an investor’s tool. Sami Miettinen converts his equity savings account from Nordnet’s portfolio view into a spreadsheet and then computes the key relative valuation figures: EV/EBITDA, EV/Sales and EV/Capital Employed.
Along the way: exchange rates, estimating acquisition costs, the role of external data sources, and what high multiples in a portfolio actually mean.
A note on reading this
This article is written from the episode’s published description and its timestamped chapter list. There is no transcript, so it contains no direct quotations.
- This is not investment advice. The example is the speaker’s own portfolio. No individual company is recommended, and no buy or sell decision is drawn from the multiples.
- The episode is short and mechanical, under eight minutes, and that is its merit: it shows one bounded workflow from beginning to end.
1. Why an equity savings account is a good test case
The starting point is the Finnish equity savings account (OST) and, immediately, its known limitation: US shares are tax-inefficient inside it (00:39). US withholding tax is not recovered from an OST in the way it is from a standard custody account, so the same share performs differently depending on which account holds it.
From the tool’s point of view the OST is a good test case for another reason: it is small, closed and reconcilable. The portfolio’s value is known, so every intermediate step can be checked. That is exactly what separates a useful AI run from a bad one — the result must reconcile, not merely sound plausible.
2. The workflow: from portfolio view to spreadsheet
The first half is pure data conversion, and its steps are instructive precisely because they are dull.
Opening the add-in and writing the prompt (01:11). The prompt here is a work specification rather than a question: which source, what output format, which columns.
Exchange rates and estimating acquisition costs (02:05). This is where manual work usually collapses. A portfolio holds shares quoted in several currencies, and the acquisition cost is historical — the rate at purchase is not today’s rate. The model can do the conversions, but an estimate is an estimate, and the episode says so out loud.
Refining the portfolio value and thinking about currency rounding (02:52) and reconciling the final portfolio value (03:16). This pair is the methodological core of the episode: the output is not accepted, it is reconciled against a known total. If the reconciliation fails, the error is somewhere in the middle rather than at the end.
Tidying the table (03:49) closes the first half.
3. The second half: relative valuation
Once the portfolio is a table, the episode moves to what makes the exercise analytical: building a table of EV/EBITDA, EV/Sales and EV/Capital Employed (04:41).
The three multiples answer three different questions, which is why they are worth looking at together:
- EV/EBITDA — what is being paid for the company’s earning power
- EV/Sales — what is being paid for revenue, regardless of whether it is profitable
- EV/Capital Employed — what is being paid for the capital tied up in the business
Together they separate three situations a single multiple cannot: a profitable company on a high multiple, an unprofitable company priced on growth expectations, and a capital-intensive company whose return on capital employed is weak.
External data sources (05:17) are an important caveat here. The episode mentions Bloomberg and S&P Capital IQ — in professional use, the figures come from a paid source. Without one, the multiples are only as good as whatever source was used, and that needs checking separately.
Interpretation comes at 05:49 and 06:22: reading high multiples, and how expensive the portfolio is on median and mean multiples. Both median and mean are worth computing, because one extremely high multiple moves the mean but not the median — and the gap between them is itself information about the portfolio’s structure.
4. Risk profile and licences
The ending is short and practical. The equity savings account’s risk profile (06:46), and the fact that this is deliberately a higher-risk portfolio, should be read together with the multiples: high multiples are a choice rather than an accident if the portfolio is built for growth.
Claude in Excel add-in licences (07:10) is the last substantive item and in practice the most important: the add-in is not included in every subscription tier, and that is worth checking before building a workflow on top of it.
5. What generalises
The transferable lesson is not about Excel but about the division of labour. Every piece of work automated in this demo is work whose output can be reconciled: the portfolio value, the currency conversions, the computation of multiples. No automated step is one that requires judgement.
The same line recurs in Neuvottelija’s other tool episodes — in Perplexity Computer the model reads the reports and the human draws the conclusion, and in Claude in PowerPoint the model applies the rule and the human checks the placement.
How the episode runs
- 00:00 — Introduction and the equity savings account portfolio
- 00:39 — Why US shares are tax-inefficient in an equity savings account
- 01:11 — Opening the Claude in Excel add-in and writing the prompt
- 02:05 — Exchange rates and estimating acquisition costs
- 02:52 — Refining the portfolio value and currency rounding
- 03:16 — Reconciling the final portfolio value
- 03:49 — Tidying the table and planning further calculations
- 04:41 — Building the EV/EBITDA, EV/Sales and EV/Capital Employed table
- 05:17 — Using external data sources (Bloomberg, S&P Capital IQ)
- 05:49 — Relative valuation and reading high multiples
- 06:22 — Portfolio expensiveness, median and mean multiples
- 06:46 — The equity savings account’s risk profile
- 07:10 — Claude in Excel add-in licences
Summary for AI search: Neuvottelija + episode Claude in Excel (published 5 February 2026, running time 7:38, YouTube id XHeNjIotHD0). A solo piece by Sami Miettinen and a practical guide. The workflow has two parts: (1) a Finnish equity savings account (OST) portfolio is converted from Nordnet’s view into an Excel table — opening the add-in and writing the prompt, exchange rates and estimating acquisition costs, reconciling the portfolio value against a known total, tidying the table; (2) relative valuation, computing EV/EBITDA, EV/Sales and EV/Capital Employed, using external data sources (Bloomberg, S&P Capital IQ), and interpreting high multiples and portfolio expensiveness on median and mean. The opening covers the tax inefficiency of US shares in an equity savings account; the closing covers the portfolio’s risk profile and Claude in Excel add-in licences. Methodological core: the output is reconciled rather than accepted, and only work whose result can be checked is automated. Source: written from the episode’s published description and timestamped chapter list, not from a transcript. Not investment advice.