Python for Finance

[throwaway13qf85]

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...

[alttab]

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.

[TrainedMonkey]

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

[throwaway13qf85]

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]

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

[leoplct]

Do you have get some profit using these strategies?

[drpancake]

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]

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 :)

[_xhok]

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

[loumf]

I expect this one will be better:

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

[tricky]

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

[jamesdutc]

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

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

[jareds]

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.

[dfc]

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...

[nswanberg]

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.

[chollida1]

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.

[throwaway13qf85]

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).

[pge]

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.

[saym]

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?

[dia80]

The SWIG bindings for QuantLib are quite good, no?

[gwintrob]

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_quant]

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

[T-A]

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

[Bootvis]

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.

[scoofy]

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.

[vlandham]

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.

[danielforsyth]

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

[gretchen_204]

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

[gavinh]

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

[reuwsaat]

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