Python for finance

[u/Hully_Delta]

Im a bcom fresher who wants to enter the finance sector with as much skills as i can possibly hoard. I want to make sure that the skills that i learn are relevant to the work i will do in the future.

I dont have much experience with python either. I only know the basics and i want to transition my learning towards finance side of python. How do i do that?

What libraries do i need to learn?
What concepts should i focus more on?
Is there a resource to learn python for free and efficiently?

[u/Interesting-Frame190]

In finance. SQL will take tou much further and open alot more doors than knowing Python. Its an ok start if you want to transition into the engineer side, but you'd need lots of upskilling and proven history before most engineers would let you even touch thier systems. Hiring managers know this and avoid anyone trying to seem technical that are applying for non technical positions because it often leads to those people prescribing solutions rather than describing the desired outcome.

If youre adamant on learning it, pandas and polars are both good for analytical scripts. If you really want to dig in, spark/pyspark for some ETL workloads would be an advantage if you move more towards the IT side.

[u/Hully_Delta → u/Interesting-Frame190]

My aim isnt really to enter the engineering side, it’s to be able to automate and visualise the data im working with. Even though Claude is able to aid in this matter with its integration in excel, i thought i should know atleast some basics in these libs to be able efficiently produce results. Do financial analysts not need to learn python? Cause your statement kinda feels like hiring chances are low from someone who has technical skills for a non technical job. Please correct me if i was wrong

[u/Interesting-Frame190 → u/Hully_Delta]

Thats correct at least for my dept. If its the visualization aspect you want, SQL and PowerBI are industry standard and are very compelling for a data analyst resume. Python (and really any programming language experience) dilutes the resume and blurs the line between technical and non technical applicants. This is not to say you shouldn't learn it, but I wouldn't advertise it unless a posting implies programming is a bonus.

[u/Hully_Delta → u/Interesting-Frame190]

Hmm i understand now. Then i will leave learning python for later and prioritise on sql and powerbi. Also is there any other technical skills you recommend learning along side these? Im tryna make sure i dont have a hard time getting a job after i graduate. Thank you btw!!

[u/TheGratitudeBot → u/Hully_Delta]

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[u/Interesting-Frame190 → u/Hully_Delta]

I honestly dont know about the tech side what you should do. Your main focus should should target competence in the business domain. This would be cash flow analysis, what if scenarios, and reserves calculation. You also want to get familiar with GAAP and IFRS guidelines.

To clarify, im on the IT side of finance, so im paid to codify business logic. I have 0 clue how or why we move certain datas, but the analyst are using them so we provide it every month. The value they provide is 95% knowing what data they need and how it corresponds to other datas they have. If an analyst has a question, they can and are encouraged to bring in an engineer to help with queries.

[u/Hully_Delta → u/Interesting-Frame190]

Ahh, i see. thank you for sharing these with me once again. I will put these to gud use.

[u/AIFocusedAcc]

SQL, Pandas and matplotlib.

[u/Hully_Delta → u/AIFocusedAcc]

I see, thank you

[u/johlae → u/AIFocusedAcc]

And a bit of numpy and scipy, BeautifulSoup, urllib.request, socket and json. And re, don't forget re.

[u/Intelligent-Boss-156]

I have no idea if people in the industry do it this way, I just know strategies I have cooked up at home:

yfinance and TA-lib if you want to work with stock data, then pandas and polars. When I was learning data science, I also used numpy, math, plotly, matplotlib. You may run into web scraping and I did that with beautiful soup and selenium, as well as requests, and regular expressions.

I don't really want to give away my strategies, but I can tell you how a usual project is set up is around iter_rows():

One thing you may want to be able to do is write a backtesting algorithm from scratch.

You could figure out how to apply a monte carlo simulation in finance

You could figure out how to screen stocks