# Trading Programming Languages?



## NAsX (29 September 2009)

Hi guys,

I have noticed in a lot of the trading/finance jobs that they require knowledge of programming, and since I've got some spare time I thought it may be worthwhile to look into them.

Was wondering if people know what language is used by most funds/prop shops...etc? Or should I say which would be the most popular language atm? (please excuse my noob talk, don't really know much about how they work)

Cheers


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## schnootle (2 October 2009)

I don't have much idea about the finance industry specifically, but i do about programming in general. The general advice people will give you is don't worry too much about what you choose as a language to learn from, the first language is the hardest to learn but after that picking up new languages is not too hard.  

You could do a lot worse than learning "Python", it is probably ones of the easiest languages to learn but also is very powerful (there is not many things you can't do). The other reason python is probably a good choice is there are free libraries call Scipy, Numpy, Matplotlib which give you a lot of the plotting and statistical analysis capabilities of MATLAB.

The other thing i have realised is that sometimes when someone says "knowledge of programming" they just mean Excel - oh the pain.


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## mazzatelli (2 October 2009)

Agreed with schnootle re Python

Matlab is decent, but I'd also recommend learning R for statistical analysis, because its command line driven, so its open endedness will be invaluable in the future [just like Python].

Plus with the support of Open Source, there are many excellent plugins being created and updated. I'm currently using its time series and neural net plugins. Top notch 

Ugh. Excel + VBA is a pain


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## skyQuake (2 October 2009)

mazzatelli said:


> Agreed with schnootle re Python
> 
> Matlab is decent, but I'd also recommend learning R for statistical analysis, because its command line driven, so its open endedness will be invaluable in the future [just like Python].
> 
> ...




Try coding in Open Office then, its Python 
PIC RELATED


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## PrudentInvestor (24 February 2010)

NAsX said:


> Hi guys,
> 
> I have noticed in a lot of the trading/finance jobs that they require knowledge of programming, and since I've got some spare time I thought it may be worthwhile to look into them.
> 
> ...




This depends on the kind of job you're looking for.  If you want to go high frequency, your best shot is probably c++. On the other hand, I agree with the previous posters on the usefulness of Matlab and R - but only if you aim for a more development-oriented job where you would be researching strategies etc. Matlab is sloooooooow (and so are the other scripting languages mentioned by the previous posters, by the way) compared to c++.


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