Finance, Scientific Users Get ActivePython Updates 131
jcasman sends along this clip from PCWorld: "ActiveState has added three open source mathematics libraries to its ActivePython Python distribution that might interest financial and scientific computing markets, the company announced Thursday. The packages are being added, in part, to anticipate the demand that may arise from new proposed rules for the US financial community brought about by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. ... In April, the government agency posted a set of proposed rules for handling asset-backed securities that called for financial firms to disclose, along with their prospectus filings, the source code of the programs that generated the filings, as rendered in Python. The government agency will be accepting input about the proposed rule until August 2. The three libraries that are being added to the ActivePython package are NumPy, SciPy, and matplotlib."
Great tools (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Great! (Score:4, Insightful)
That link is unrelated to this post. The referenced scientific/numeric libraries for python are implemented in C as native modules. They are not just as fast as the equivalent code written in C, they *ARE* the equivalent code written in C, merely interfaced to with python. You might lose a meaningless tiny fraction of time preparing your vectors for processing in python, but you'll save several orders of magnitude more time not worrying so much about malloc corruption.
Re:advanced financial modeling (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:advanced financial modeling (Score:2, Insightful)
From http://www.sec.gov/rules/proposed/2010/33-9117.pdf [sec.gov] (p 205-206)
This proposed requirement is designed to make it easier for an investor to conduct a thorough investment analysis of the ABS offering at the time of its initial investment decision. In addition, an investor may monitor ongoing performance of purchased ABS by updating its investment analysis from time to time to reflect updated asset performance.338 In this way, market participants would be able to conduct their own evaluations of ABS and may be less dependent on the analysis of third parties such as credit rating agencies.
The waterfall is a critical component of an ABS. Currently investors receive only a textual description of this information in the prospectus, which may make it difficult for them to perform a rigorous quantitative analysis of the ABS.339
Re:Good stuff (Score:3, Insightful)
I would be very interested in what matlab is choking on that Python wouldn't. The only data I've had matlab give me errors on is stuff that starts breaking 32-bit memory addressing. (In 32-bit Windows).
I'm a hardcore matlab user and while there is no chance in hell my company would ever give it up for python, I'd consider it for some of my personal projects.
And as limited as it is, there is one feature of the Matlab Editor that I don't think my lazy self could live without. Ctrl-A Ctrl-I, select all and auto indent. Everything is properly formatted to the right depth. php_beautifier is close for my php, but I still have to run it on the command line.
Is there any python IDE with this built in... anything that mimics the 'desktop' of Matlab?
Re:Good stuff (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, I am. I know absolutely nothing about Python. I earn my keep with Matlab. I know C (which is quite useful for CANape scripts) and use PHP in my free time.
I just asked a simple question. Rather than answering, you respond with a jackass comment of "ha, are you serious?". Which now just makes me want to disregard Python and all this crap and I'll just stick with my Matlab and short PHP script for doing repetitive stuff.
It's a little less forward than RTFM but just as condescending. And you wonder why complete novices throw their hands up at Linux and the such.