Python for Finance

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JZMZ1NK/

by mjhea0 • 12 years ago

127 61 12 years ago

Does anyone know if this is any good? I don't think that Packt is a particularly reputable publisher. They published a similar book about Haskell (called "Haskell Financial Data Modelling and Predictive Analytics") which was absolutely terrible - useless for learning anything about Haskell, finance, data modelling or predictive analytics.

You can find a commentary on that book here on Reddit[0].

I hope this book is better, but I will withhold judgement until someone comes along who's read it and is able to give an informed opinion.

[0] http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1rj2jq/book_haskell...

alttab3• 12 years ago

The modelling the book covers is the best of the best. Not sure about the content of the book itself, but the Finances seem straight on.

throwaway13qf857• 12 years ago

I don't think I would call CAPM, the Fama-French 3-factor model, VaR, Black-Scholes and GARCH "the best of the best".

I would probably call the selection of topics "finance basics that no one in industry uses any more".

It may be suitable as a beginner's guide if the quality of the exposition is good enough, but my suspicion is that you would be better off getting a copy of "Python for Data Analysis" and a decent quant finance textbook.

jareds2• 12 years ago

Is this book available in a DRM free format? I’m blind and attempting to read the book word by word on my iPhone to follow code samples and then entering them in the computer is not worth it.

nswanberg• 12 years ago

Yes. While it costs a few dollars more than Amazon, you can buy it from the publisher here: http://www.packtpub.com/python-for-finance/book

Packt says that their ebooks are DRM free in the "Pactk Facts" section here: https://www.packtpub.com/about

Like other tech publishers, they frequently have discount codes on their ebooks, though $20 doesn't seem expensive if the information is useful.

a3n2• 12 years ago

I have bought two or three Packt books.

They have very light DRM: they print your name (or whatever you give them as your name) in the book. There are no copy prevention measures, they're just straight pdf or other format.

It's actually a nice compromise.

dfc3• 12 years ago

Can I bother you with some accessibility questions? (Sorry HN but no contact info in profile) I am currently converting a giant (2800+ pages) government pdf[1] to markdown so that it can be converted to html/epub/latex/etc. I am casually aware of the DAISY file format but have not found any free software tools for creating DAISY files. Is there anything I can do that would be better for you than DRM free epub/mobi files and/or plain markdown text files?

[1] http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-CONAN-2013/pdf/GPO-CONAN-20... -- http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-CONAN-2013/content-detail.h...

jareds2• 12 years ago

Will try to look at that site tonight. I've updated my profile with contact info.

Noelkd• 12 years ago

How are you converting it?

loumf• 12 years ago

I expect this one will be better:

http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032441.do

tricky• 12 years ago

Looks interesting. Can you elaborate on why you think it will be good? Glad to see they're using Pandas.

big_youth• 12 years ago

This book is written by Yves J. Hilpisch a premier figure in the big data python world and great teacher. He has another more advanced book, which I loved, called Derivative Analytics with Python[0] and has given many well known and received talks.

Note, I am Continuum Analytics[1] alumni, of which is Yves J. Hilpisch is the European director and whose CEO was the lead contributer to NumPy for many years.

So my endorsement is not against Packt's Python for Finance but rather for O'Reillys Python for Finance based on previous work and experience of the Author.

[0] http://www.python-for-finance.com/ [1] http://continuum.io/

mynegation• 12 years ago

The author is pretty well known in the (very narrow I suppose) circle of quants using Python. He has a company working in the field[0] and also works for Continuum Analytics[1] which are the guys doing very interesting things in PyData community.

[0] http://www.derivatives-analytics.com/ [1] http://continuum.io/our-team

yves_quant5• 12 years ago

I am the author of the O'Reilly book.

The book mainly covers chapter by chapter "all you need" to do Finance with Python. From data structures, performance Python, (Bayesian) statistics, stochastics to Excel integration and Web technologies.

It also provides -- in addition to many smaller examples and use cases -- a larger case study about a complete, integrated derivatives pricing library.

Here the table of contents as it stands now (work still in progress! Early Release covers chapters 4-7, 1-3 and 8 will be added soon):

http://hilpisch.com/Yves_Python_4_Finance_Contents.pdf

jamesdutc• 12 years ago

By the same author, "Derivatives Analytics with Python":

http://derivatives-analytics-with-python.com/

chollida1• 12 years ago

I've ordered a copy of this book.

I have a coy of Haskell Financial Data Modelling, which someone else had asked about.

I don't want to be too negative, but I didn't get too much out of this book. It moves pretty slow when explaining both Haskell and the financial content. To be fair, this might be considered an advantage if you are new to both.

It also doesn't really give you alot of "actionable code" that you can drop into an existing system. Each chapter is an introduction to large subjects, so I guess by definition the author can't dive very deeply.

In contrast the posted book seems to cover a bit more ground and seems to include on graphing and practical applications of black scholes, which is nice.

I'll post a review once I've read it.

throwaway13qf857• 12 years ago

I would be more forthright - the Haskell book was a travesty that never should have been published and I wouldn't want to inflict it on anyone (I have experience with all three of Haskell, quant finance and modelling & analytics and I am confident in saying that the Haskell book is useless).

T-A• 12 years ago

I guess the book grew out of http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?Abstract_id=2197975

Bootvis• 12 years ago

I hope not. I quote:

    I show how to use Python, free software, as a financial calculator to estimate 
    PV, FV, PV of annuity, to estimate effective rates, beta and more.

I can literally do that with the built in functions of pocket calculator. Doing that in Python isn't very interesting. It will take some huge steps in only 321 pages to get to proficient use of NumPy and co from there.

reuwsaat• 12 years ago

This is news how? Isn't this what reviews are or on Amazon?

gwintrob• 12 years ago

Maybe it's news because the Kindle price is discounted?

I don't know the book, but anyone interested in financial modeling in Python should check out https://datanitro.com/ and their Excel API https://voyager.datanitro.com/. Definitely a big improvement over Visual Basic macros.

yves_quant5• 12 years ago

In my O'Reilly book I also cover Excel integration, both without and with the DataNitro solution.

drpancake3• 12 years ago

Shameless plug: my site Tradewave would be an ideal place to try some of these techniques out. We let you write automated trading algorithms for cryptocurrencies, in the browser, with Python.

https://tradewave.net

jkbr• 12 years ago

Interesting. I've been working on a trading bot (for Bitstamp) written in Python and this comes pretty close to what I had in mind :)

drpancake3• 12 years ago

Feel free to drop me an email if you have any feature requests.

james@tradewave.net

_xhok• 12 years ago

Having struggled hard with the problem of remote Python code execution before, I'm quite interested how you're doing it. Mind sharing?

drpancake3• 12 years ago

Essentially you can't sandbox CPython at the interpreter level, it's too introspective (I do it anyway though, just as a first level of defence). You need sandboxing at the OS level.

Happy to go into more details by email.

TrainedMonkey• 12 years ago

I took computational investing on coursera, which seems to have some overlap with the contents of the book. Course involves building and back testing stock trading strategies in python.

https://www.coursera.org/course/compinvesting1

leoplct• 12 years ago

Do you have get some profit using these strategies?

myth_drannon• 12 years ago

no, because the prof that teaches this course still didn't make any money using these strategies, otherwise he would be on his yacht in French Riviera

throwaway13qf857• 12 years ago

Is that the Georgia Tech/Tucker Balch course?

I'm amazed that GT let him teach that course. It's full of errors, omissions and bad habits. I vaguely followed along, and the most noticeable thing was how much the students complained about the low quality of the course.

The only result of someone implementing the advice in that course is that they'd lose a lot of money quite quickly.

dnesteruk• 12 years ago

That course isn't really well done. There are much better quant courses out there on Coursera.

vlandham• 12 years ago

I'm pretty excited about QuantStart's up-coming book+code:

http://www.quantstart.com/successful-algorithmic-trading-ebo...

It is in a similar vein: python + finance. Based on the depth of the blog posts, I expect a lot of good content.

pge• 12 years ago

One of the projects on my back burner is to write a decent financial library for Python. The closest out there is numpy.financial, but it is not well done. I have contributed bug fixes to some of the functions but have not done a comprehensive overhaul, and I question whether numpy is where financial functions should live. A standalone library would be simpler, except for the fact that having access to scipy's numerical solver is handy for some functions. My proposed starting point would be a library that covered the financial functions available in Excel.

dia80• 12 years ago

The SWIG bindings for QuantLib are quite good, no?

saym• 12 years ago

Is this something you think you'll get to in the near future? and is there a way I could stay updated about such a library?

scoofy• 12 years ago

I've been working on a free finance application in python if anyone want's to help: https://github.com/scoofy/wxStocks

It's not yet really functional, but i've been working on it for a while, and it scrapes yql and some morningstar pretty well.

danielforsyth• 12 years ago

Any suggestions for a intro to finance text? I am pretty good with python already, should I wait for the oreily book?

gavinh• 12 years ago

I have read several of Packt's titles, and their quality is inconsistent.

gretchen_204• 12 years ago

Just went through the table of contents. There are some interesting topics in there. You can go through them here: http://www.packtpub.com/python-for-finance/book

Python for Finance

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