Hi David, thanks again for all those videos you posted. Theyre very helpful!

I was just wondering if I could ask your advice. I was just looking at some of your examples where you used the Solver in Excel. I tried using the Solver in a very similar way but it won’t work. For example, two of my variables are: RedemptionRate and Incentive. Currently, the correlation between these two variables is .207. What I’m trying to do is filter my incentives such that this correlation is maximized (ie maybe the correlation increases if I only include incentives > 0 or incentives between -.5 and .02, etc.)

I tried using Excel’s solver to do this. I have RedRate in Column A, Incentives in Column B. Then, in cell C2, I include a maximum filter and in cell C4 I include a minimum filter. Then, I use if statements to create column D which only contains the incentives from column B if they are within the min and max and if not, the cell is null. Then, I calculate the correlation between columns A and D. I use Excel’s solver and specify to maximize the correlation by changing cells C2 and C4.

This does not work. I was wondering if you had any idea why something like this doesn’t work? To me, its not much different from the examples you were trying. Any advice greatly appreciated. Thanks!