Hi, I have my heart set on a career in portfolio management. Is it worth it investing the time in learning the R language? Working in finance you deal with data and analysis all the time so my assumption is that it wouldn't hurt. Thanks

Python is probably better since with pandas you can do everything you can do with r plus it’s closer to a normal programming language which will be useful if you end up in a job where you can add value by just automating simple tasks (which is a lot of them). The reason to use r is that a lot of academic research comes out in r first (so you can just download their packages instead of replicating it yourself) but at your level that probably won’t be an issue.

Soccer Mom hit on this pretty well. Honestly it depends on what role you'll have. If you're in a quant role, you'll probably use one or the other. Knowing one is a good start, and the shop will deal with whatever the consequences are should they get that far. I'm big on Python as well, although R does tend to have a bit more of an academic edge. SQL is literally a language for getting data.

Couple of thoughts here: 1) R is cool for stats research and visualization. TBH, the latter is where you'll be spending your time outshining excel. (Besides regressions, how much heavy stats do you think you'll do?) 2) The above is different if you are a quant. Numerical accuracy matters a lot and R is a analysis language. I bet quants are going to use C++ for the heavy lifting by writing high grade code to solve problems 3) The division of labor is real. JPM's quants and engineers developer and maintain the tools so you can focus on comparative advantage.

Benefits of learning R language

Mostly Random Dude

I have moved all of my infrastructure AND models from R to Python a few years ago. There are still things that R does better, but Python in Jupiter is such a great tool that it makes up for these deficiencies.

I have to say that the choice of the programming language will depend on PM preference, asset class and existing infrastructure. You should assume that you will end up learning and forgetting multiple languages through your career and there is nothing bad about that.

PS. I just wish there was a “table editor” that could be plugged into python

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Benefits of learning R language

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