What this book covers
Chapter 1, Getting Started with pandas Using Wakari.io, walks you through using Wakari.io, an online collaborative data analytics platform, that utilizes Python, IPython Notebook, and pandas. We will start with a brief overview of Wakari.io and step through how to upgrade the default Python environment and install all of the tools used throughout this text. At the end, you will have a fully functional financial analytics platform supporting all of the examples we will cover.
Chapter 2, Introducing the Series and DataFrame, teaches you about the core pandas data structures—the Series and the DataFrame. You will learn how a Series expands on the functionality of the NumPy array to provide much richer representation and manipulation of sequences of data through the use of high-performance indices. You will then learn about the pandas DataFrame and how to use it to model two-dimensional tabular data.
Chapter 3, Reshaping, Reorganizing, and Aggregating, focuses on how to use pandas to group data, enabling you to perform aggregate operations on grouped data to assist with deriving analytic results. You will learn to reorganize, group, and aggregate stock data and to use grouped data to calculate simple risk measurements.
Chapter 4, Time-series, explains how to use pandas to represent sequences of pricing data that are indexed by the progression of time. You will learn how pandas represents date and time as well as concepts such as periods, frequencies, time zones, and calendars. The focus then shifts to learning how to model time-series data with pandas and to perform various operations such as shifting, lagging, resampling, and moving window operations.
Chapter 5, Time-series Stock Data, leads you through retrieving and performing various financial calculations using historical stock quotes obtained from Yahoo! Finance. You will learn to retrieve quotes, perform various calculations, such as percentage changes, cumulative returns, moving averages, and volatility, and finish with demonstrations of several analysis techniques including return distribution, correlation, and least squares analysis.
Chapter 6, Trading Using Google Trends, demonstrates how to form correlations between index data and trends in searches on Google. You will learn how to gather index data from Quandl along with trend data from Google and then how to correlate this time-series data and use that information to generate trade signals, which will be used to calculate the effectiveness of the trading strategy as compared to the actual market performance.
Chapter 7, Algorithmic Trading, introduces you to the concepts of algorithmic trading through demonstrations of several trading strategies, including simple moving averages, exponentially weighted averages, crossovers, and pairs-trading. You will then learn to implement these strategies with pandas data structures and to use Zipline, an open source back-testing tool, to simulate trading behavior on historical data.
Chapter 8, Working with Options, teaches you to model and evaluate options. You will first learn briefly about options, how they function, and how to calculate their payoffs. You will then load options data from Yahoo! Finance into pandas data structures and examine various options attributes, such as implied volatility and volatility smiles and smirks. We then examine the pricing of options with Black-Scholes using Mibian and finish with an overview of Greeks and how to calculate them using Mibian.
Chapter 9, Portfolios and Risk, will teach you how to model portfolios of multiple stocks using pandas. You will learn about the concepts of Modern Portfolio Theory and how to apply those theories with pandas and Python to calculate the risk and returns of a portfolio, assign different weights to different instruments in a portfolio, derive the Sharpe ratio, calculate efficient frontiers and value at risk, and optimize portfolio instrument allocation.
