Ask HN: Best language for finance?

3 points·hwallace··5 comments

I was hoping someone with personal experience could give me some insight on what programming language(s) would be best applied to stock market analysis and/or automated trading.

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I can't speak for best, but:

Ocaml is used and praised by Jane Street [1]

Python has a nice suite of financial tools available [2]

It may be that the best tool for analysis and for trading are different. For the former you want visualization tools and interactive exploration, but for the latter, you may need raw speed or relative safety of the code.

[1] https://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/61 [2] http://wiki.quantsoftware.org/index.php?title=QuantSoftware_...

I agree with MetaJack that analysis and execution are two different disciplines. "Quants" use tools like R and Excel, while the models and trading engines are most likely C++ or Java.

Python is gathering momentum now that pandas has brought a proper dataframe object to the language. Python is multi-paradigm, so you can write functional code when you need, objects when you want them, or scripts if it is convenient. Most people I know who are not using python complain of needing 3 or 4 languages to cover their needs (perl for data munging, R/Matlab for research, C/C++/C#/Java for production.

We build nearly everything in python at https://www.quantopian.com

I don't have any personal experience but perhaps you could trawl through some job boards or wherever the kind of job you would like is advertised. Look for what languages they mention.

Excel/VBA and C++

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