[R-SIG-Finance] Career/Educational Advice - First Post

[Steven D. Moffitt]

Dear R Users Group,

For statistical applications, I have found R to be superior to Matlab and Mathematica, and equal to SPlus.  I use R for all modelling applications in my market research.

>From my standpoint, the best feature of R is that professional statisticians publish cutting-edge work in R packages.  Some of this new work is quite useful in developing trading systems, portfolio selection, etc.

The other main reason I prefer R is that the data types are explicitly structured for statistical analysis - e.g. data.frames carry row labels and field names, factors are useful for grouped analyses and so on, and the type of "object oriented" structures suffice to build analytic hierarchies.

Besides R, I use OpenOffice routinely.

Best,

Steve Moffitt, Ph.D.

Director of Research
WH Trading, LLC
1900 W. Adams, Suite 1900
Chicago, IL  60606

and 

Adjunct Professor of Finance
Illinois Institute of Technology
565 W. Adams
Chicago, IL    60565


---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: "Thomas Steiner" <finbref.2006 at gmail.com>
Date:  Thu, 2 Oct 2008 18:20:21 +0200

>> 2. How much of open-source technology, R/Rmetrics is being used by the
>> financial industry? ...
>
>I work in the Front office (part of the "financial industry") in
>Emerging markets fixed income and I can say that people here prefer
>here quick, dirty and simple and so they stick to ready made solutions
>of all these ready made (grahical) solutions of proprietary software,
>namely unsing the Bloomberg and Reuters addins in Excel to look at
>things (and use them in MS Word). No open source - not only because IT
>guy do not allow us to install our own software, but people just use
>it for historical reasons and they are unwilling to learn sth new.
>Probably for real "quants" this is differnt.
>Thomas
>
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