R programming
I just started a class in Computational Finance and Financial Econometrics. Most of the financial modeling is done in Excel but we are also using R. I was wondering if R is gaining popularity in the financial sector. I know most quants use scripting languages such as C++/Pear/Python/Java and some of the common statistical software packages are E-views/SAS/Matlab. R is similar to the other software packages but the major difference is that its free which is why I was wondering if it's and up and coming analytic took that analysts are using on the job.
people use r but nobody uses eviews
R is now probably the most popular statistical language by sheer number of users but SAS is still more common because a) open source scares most corporate types and b) R has no real support to speak of.
I am definitely a SAS guy. I work for a government statistical agency and our in house software is SAS because it can handle much larger data sets and can be run off a Unix server. I guess I'll continue to learn R and expand my resume by 1 letter. Thanks for the feedback
Anyone have good links on R reading data from Excel, run script, and export results back to Excel? I'd love to read more about about it. I have a little experience with R and a shit ton of experience with VBA.
There are some really good youtube videos on importing/export data files from various formats. I recommend videos by "economicurtis". Basically, its a pain to import/export spreadsheets in .xls format. Its recommended that you save the spreadsheet as .csv which is much easier to read into R.
R is worth learning. I fucking love it -- use it every day, even for things I could easily do in Excel (I prefer R's visualization tools). Admittedly, I haven't seen it used in finance all that much (financial types would rather spend $2,000 on an equivalent technology since 'costs money' is corporate speak for 'risk management').
Is the only advantage of R (against that "$2000 equivalent technology) the cost?
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