R and Python in Finance
Hi I’m a student in college studying Econ and Data Science. I was wondering how prevalent R and Python are in Finance? With much larger data sets they’re much more powerful than excel and mitigate human error. Is the industry in the future moving towards R and Python as necessary tools?
Python is much more common for more advanced uses. For business analytics and simple statistics you have R. Python has a lot of great libraries that make your finance calculations a lot easier - they have special functions like auto downloading all the S&P data, specific stock price data etc. When I tried to do that with R, I had to download this data manually, but for Python, there is an inbuilt function for that. And the possibilities of Python go far beyond that, with their power of Machine Learning libraries and AI - haven't hear if you can build visual recognition systems in R, for example, or analyze geospatial data using R at the level of Python.
Also, look at the job postings from hedge funds etc. - they mostly require Python + one other programming language like Java or C++.
So, my advise: stick to Python. R is for academics, business analysts, and statisticians, IMHO.
Agree, Python is very universal as well. One thing you want to keep in mind is legacy.... once you write a program you’d like other people to maintain / modify and have it outlive your tenure in your role. It makes it a lot easier to do that if you choose to program in a language that lost people know.
Not to say that the others aren’t useful, but you’ll probably encounter more people who know / use python.
in case it may be helpful, you can download stock data from yahoo or FRED data with R using quantmod. fread function is also useful for automatically downloading online csv files
You can learn R pretty quickly. Picked It up in my statistical modeling class in a semester. Knowing both would be a good skill set, I’m also a data science minor. with that being said, you can use the pandas, matplotlib, and sklearn packages with Python to accomplish anything you’d do in R studio, from Linear and Logistic regression to plots and model selection. Python is ultimately more applicable.
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