From the course: Algorithmic Trading and Finance Models with Python, R, and Stata Essential Training

One software option: Python

From the course: Algorithmic Trading and Finance Models with Python, R, and Stata Essential Training

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One software option: Python

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- [Instructor] Okay, let's go ahead and dive into our first software package that we're going to look at using algorithmic trading around and that's called Python. Now, I'm not talking about the snake that inhabits Florida and periodically eats your pet parrot or cat or whatever. No, Python is a programming language and Python is available for free online. One of the best places to get access to Python is through what's called Anaconda. Again, not a snake. You can go to anaconda.org and download the Anaconda Navigator. Once you do that, you'll have access to Python. All right, now that we've downloaded Anaconda, I'm in the Anaconda Navigator and as you'll see Anaconda is really like a shell. It's a overlay that gives you a variety of different tools you can use, including various Python options, but also opportunities to use things like R. Now, I'm going to operate Python through the JupyterLabs program. So I'll go ahead and launch JupyterLabs and once I've done that it'll pop up in Google. Once we're in JupyterLabs now, we'll use a notebook and this'll allow us to go through and put in basic Python commands. Once we open up the notebook, you'll see we've got to a pretty basic looking program to enable us to put in various pieces of code. Now, we're not going to do anything particularly complicated here. Let's just start with something basic. Let's pretend that we wanted to print out a particular line of code for whatever reason. This is the simplest possible program, line in Python, so let's just print out something that'll say, "Hello world." Well to do that in Python, we'd simply type print ("Hello world") and voila. And that's our introduction to Python. Now again, in this course we're not going to take you through all the nuts and bolts in Python. I simply want to introduce you to the software and show you how you do a particular few tips, tools, and tricks that'll be relevant from the point of view of algorithmic trading. So this now gets you started. At this point, you should have Python on your machine. You should have Anaconda available to you and you're prepared to actually go in and start doing any programming you need.

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