
Python for Finance - mjhea0
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00JZMZ1NK/
======
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...](http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1rj2jq/book_haskell_financial_data_modeling_and/)

~~~
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.

~~~
throwaway13qf85
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.

~~~
arahuja
Recommendations on the latter?

~~~
wengzilla
The gold standard for quant books: Hull's Options, Futures, and Derivatives.

[http://www.amazon.com/Options-Futures-Derivatives-
DerivaGem-...](http://www.amazon.com/Options-Futures-Derivatives-DerivaGem-
Package/dp/0132777428/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1398977502&sr=1-1&keywords=options+futures+and+derivatives)

~~~
throwaway13qf85
This is very much a beginner's book. When I interviewed for _internships_ in
the summer of 2008, the interviewers expected that I would already be familiar
with a large portion of the content of this book.

------
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](https://www.coursera.org/course/compinvesting1)

~~~
leoplct
Do you have get some profit using these strategies?

~~~
myth_drannon
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

------
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](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 :)

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

james@tradewave.net

------
loumf
I expect this one will be better:

[http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920032441.do](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.

~~~
yves_quant
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](http://hilpisch.com/Yves_Python_4_Finance_Contents.pdf)

~~~
paperwork
Looks very interesting. Is the table of contents final? I didn't see any
mention of fixed income. Will this book serve as a good intro for a programmer
from the equities world (no specialized math or finance training)?

~~~
yves_quant
Adding to this: yes, the book should serve as a good intro to Python for
people with an equities background. But it should also useful for people with
a different financial background.

~~~
paperwork
Thanks, I actually meant how useful this book will be for professional
programmers who want to understand financial math? (btw, I actually bought
your book already :) )

------
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/pdf/GPO-
CONAN-2013.pdf) \-- [http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-CONAN-2013/content-
detail.h...](http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-CONAN-2013/content-detail.html)

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

~~~
dfc
Many thanks. When I have something close to a final product I will get in
touch with you.

------
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?

------
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/](https://datanitro.com/) and their
Excel API [https://voyager.datanitro.com/](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](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](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...](http://www.quantstart.com/successful-algorithmic-trading-ebook)

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](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?

