My question: Is Visual Basic the most appropriate tool to use for completing
codes for Financial Models that I am learning to build in excel?
This depends on what you mean by Financial Model.
Excel is a powerful reporting language.
Excel has a large audience of developers that include business
analysts and non-programmers.
Excel is a meal-ticket programming language in that if you're
excellent at programming in it you'll be able to find a job and your
work will be appreciated.
That said.
If you are modeling pensions or variable annuities or pricing
insurance reserves it's not the tool for the job.
Each of these industries have custom software packages that vendors
sell - none of which (except perhaps a few by hobbiests) are
implemented in Excel.
Popular programming languages for advanced modeling include:
Standard languages such as C,C++,C#,Java, and VB.
Package languages such as S,SAS,APL, Mathematica
You'd see S and Mathematica in small brokerages where the investment
algorithms use advanced Mathematics (like BARRA but also Morgan
Stanley and many others) to guide their investments schemes.
You'd see SAS in places where the structure of the data is as
important as the data itself.
You'd see the standard languages in places where the original
development team developed in house code. Often in house code takes
advantage of special memory mapping or high performance data number
crunching.
You'd see APL in insurance companies where IBM left a legacy. APL is
well suited dealing with matrices which means it's perfectly suited to
modeling annuities, and computations involving mortality and
morbidity.
