Book Image

Python for Finance - Second Edition

By : Yuxing Yan
5 (1)
Book Image

Python for Finance - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Yuxing Yan

Overview of this book

This book uses Python as its computational tool. Since Python is free, any school or organization can download and use it. This book is organized according to various finance subjects. In other words, the first edition focuses more on Python, while the second edition is truly trying to apply Python to finance. The book starts by explaining topics exclusively related to Python. Then we deal with critical parts of Python, explaining concepts such as time value of money stock and bond evaluations, capital asset pricing model, multi-factor models, time series analysis, portfolio theory, options and futures. This book will help us to learn or review the basics of quantitative finance and apply Python to solve various problems, such as estimating IBM’s market risk, running a Fama-French 3-factor, 5-factor, or Fama-French-Carhart 4 factor model, estimating the VaR of a 5-stock portfolio, estimating the optimal portfolio, and constructing the efficient frontier for a 20-stock portfolio with real-world stock, and with Monte Carlo Simulation. Later, we will also learn how to replicate the famous Black-Scholes-Merton option model and how to price exotic options such as the average price call option.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Python for Finance Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Constructing an optimal portfolio


In finance, we are dealing with a trade-off between risk and return. One of the widely used criteria is Sharpe ratio, which is defined as follows:

The following program would maximize the Sharpe ratio by changing the weights of the stocks in the portfolio. The whole program could be divided into several parts. The input area is very simple, just several tickers in addition to the beginning and ending dates. Then, we define four functions, convert daily returns into annual ones, estimate a portfolio variance, estimate the Sharpe ratio, and estimate the last (that is, nth) weight when n-1 weights are estimated from our optimization procedure:

from matplotlib.finance import quotes_historical_yahoo_ochl as getData
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import scipy as sp
from scipy.optimize import fmin
  1. Code for input area:

    ticker=('IBM','WMT','C')   # tickers
    begdate=(1990,1,1)         # beginning date 
    enddate=(2012,12,31)       # ending date
    rf=0.0003        ...