Book Image

Python for Finance Cookbook

By : Eryk Lewinson
Book Image

Python for Finance Cookbook

By: Eryk Lewinson

Overview of this book

Python is one of the most popular programming languages used in the financial industry, with a huge set of accompanying libraries. In this book, you'll cover different ways of downloading financial data and preparing it for modeling. You'll calculate popular indicators used in technical analysis, such as Bollinger Bands, MACD, RSI, and backtest automatic trading strategies. Next, you'll cover time series analysis and models, such as exponential smoothing, ARIMA, and GARCH (including multivariate specifications), before exploring the popular CAPM and the Fama-French three-factor model. You'll then discover how to optimize asset allocation and use Monte Carlo simulations for tasks such as calculating the price of American options and estimating the Value at Risk (VaR). In later chapters, you'll work through an entire data science project in the financial domain. You'll also learn how to solve the credit card fraud and default problems using advanced classifiers such as random forest, XGBoost, LightGBM, and stacked models. You'll then be able to tune the hyperparameters of the models and handle class imbalance. Finally, you'll focus on learning how to use deep learning (PyTorch) for approaching financial tasks. By the end of this book, you’ll have learned how to effectively analyze financial data using a recipe-based approach.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Implementing the CAPM in Python

In this recipe, we learn how to estimate the famous Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) and obtain the beta coefficient. This model represents the relationship between the expected return on a risky asset and the market risk (also known as systematic or undiversifiable risk). CAPM can be considered a one-factor model, on top of which more complex factor models were built.

CAPM is represented by the following equation:

Here, E(ri) denotes the expected return on asset i, rf is the risk-free rate (such as a government bond), E(rm) is the expected return on the market, and is the beta coefficient.

Beta can be interpreted as the level of the asset return's sensitivity, as compared to the market in general. Some possible examples include:

  • beta <= -1: The asset moves in the opposite direction as the benchmark and in a greater amount than the...