Preface

Algorithmic trading helps you stay ahead of the market by devising strategies in quantitative analysis to gain profits and cut losses. This book will help you to understand financial theories and execute a range of algorithmic trading strategies confidently.

The book starts by introducing you to algorithmic trading, the pyfinance ecosystem, and Quantopian. You'll then cover algorithmic trading and quantitative analysis using Python, and learn how to build algorithmic trading strategies on Quantopian. As you advance, you'll gain an in-depth understanding of Python libraries such as NumPy and pandas for analyzing financial datasets, and also explore the matplotlib, statsmodels, and scikit-learn libraries for advanced analytics. Moving on, you'll explore useful financial concepts and theories such as financial statistics, leveraging and hedging, and short selling, which will help you understand how financial markets operate. Finally, you will discover mathematical models and approaches for analyzing and understanding financial time series data.

By the end of this trading book, you will be able to build predictive trading signals, adopt basic and advanced algorithmic trading strategies, and perform portfolio optimization on the Quantopian platform.