Questions tagged [finance]

Finance relates to the management of assets over time under varying conditions, usually in order to make a profit.

Introduction

Finance relates to the management of assets over time under varying conditions, usually in order to make a profit.

The finance (or "financial services") industry is an umbrella term for organisations that manage money & assets. It includes businesses like banks, credit card companies, insurance companies, consumer finance companies, stock brokerages, hedge funds and investment funds and some government sponsored enterprises.

These businesses are usually subject to government regulation, often rely on global standards and interact with each other through purely electronic markets. They employ many thousands of programmers who often turn up common programming problems.

What questions should have this tag?

Programming problems specific to the finance industry, such as:

  • financial messaging standards & protocol implementations (e.g. FIX or SWIFT)
  • domain models/patterns for accounting, currency, trading & brokerage, etc.
  • application of programming techniques to financial businesses & problems (e.g. risk management, pricing, trade netting, etc.)
  • low latency, high volume/frequency trading systems
  • implementation of common mathematical problems (e.g. time value of money, compound interest, etc.)
  • management and processing of market data
  • regulatory issues as they relate to systems programming

Other relevant forums

Questions which have more of a financial background than a programming background should rather be asked at quant.stackexchange. In particular, this tag should never be used on its own but rather in combination with a programming language.

2470 questions
33
votes
1 answer

Alternatives to the Yahoo Finance API?

Yahoo finance recently discontinued their API. I have been looking for alternatives. The ones I've found so far are Google Finance and Quandl. Google Finance was deprecated in 2011 but still appears to work somewhat. However, there is little to no…
Alex F
  • 2,086
  • 4
  • 29
  • 67
32
votes
10 answers

Finding the min max of a stock chart

Are there any specific algorithms that will allow me to find the min and max points in the picture above? I have data in text format so I don't need to find it in the picture. The problem with stocks is that they have so many local mins and maxes…
SamFisher83
  • 3,937
  • 9
  • 39
  • 52
32
votes
15 answers

Performance of C++ vs Virtual Machine languages in high frequency finance

I thought the C/C++ vs C#/Java performance question was well trodden, meaning that I'd read enough evidence to suggest that the VM languages are not necessarily any slower than the "close-to-silicon" languages. Mostly because the JIT compiler can do…
Carlos
  • 5,991
  • 6
  • 43
  • 82
31
votes
6 answers

algorithmic trading simulator/benchmark data

I am interested about playing with algorithmic trading strategies. Does anyone know if there exists simulator or benchmark data I could possibly play with offline (without actually making any investments)?
Bob
  • 10,741
  • 27
  • 89
  • 143
31
votes
6 answers

The best way to parse a FIX message?

How do you parse a FIX message using python ? (FIX message as in the 'financial' FIX Protocol)
Chez
  • 313
  • 1
  • 3
  • 4
31
votes
6 answers

How do I store data from the Bloomberg API into a Pandas dataframe?

I recently started using Python so I could interact with the Bloomberg API, and I'm having some trouble storing the data into a Pandas dataframe (or a panel). I can get the output in the command prompt just fine, so that's not an issue. A very…
Danny
  • 625
  • 2
  • 8
  • 11
29
votes
9 answers

Currency exchange rates for paypal

Does anyone know a way to get the currency exchange rates for paypal? We have custom shopping cart and use Paypal (Website Payments Standard) to handle payments. Our 'home' currency is Euro, but we would like to present our customers the option to…
Jacco
  • 23,534
  • 17
  • 88
  • 105
27
votes
8 answers

Downloading Yahoo stock prices in R

This is a newbie question in R. I am downloading yahoo finance monthly stock price data using R where the ticker names are read from a text file. I am using a loop to read the ticker names to download the data and putting them in a list. My…
user227290
  • 1,509
  • 3
  • 18
  • 26
24
votes
5 answers

How to efficiently calculate a moving Standard Deviation

Below you can see my C# method to calculate Bollinger Bands for each point (moving average, up band, down band). As you can see this method uses 2 for loops to calculate the moving standard deviation using the moving average. It used to contain an…
24
votes
4 answers

Calculating returns from a dataframe with financial data

I have a dataframe with monthly financial data: In [89]: vfiax_monthly.head() Out[89]: year month day d open close high low volume aclose 2003-01-31 2003 1 31 731246 64.95 64.95 64.95 64.95 0 …
Daniel
  • 26,899
  • 12
  • 60
  • 88
24
votes
6 answers

Financial charts in .NET? Best library to display a live streaming 1-min stock chart?

We are using C# .NET. We're looking for a method to display live streaming 1-min financial stock charts. Need: - Candlesticks - Zoom/pan - The chart scrolling in real time as it receives streaming data Woud like: - A method to print metadata on the…
Contango
  • 76,540
  • 58
  • 260
  • 305
22
votes
3 answers

Pandas' EMA not matching the stock's EMA?

I am trying to use Python (with Pandas) to calculate the 20-day Exponential Moving Averages (EMA) of daily stock data for Intel (INTC). Pandas has a number of ways of doing this, and I've also tried stockstats, which runs on Pandas, but they never…
Rob M
  • 298
  • 1
  • 4
  • 18
22
votes
4 answers

Is there a World-Wide Stock Market real-time quotes Application Programming Interface (API)?

I'm looking for an Application Programming Interface which will allow me to access quotes and other data about multiple company symbols for at least the following stock exchanges: American Stock Exchange (AMEX) Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) Bank…
Tom
  • 8,536
  • 31
  • 133
  • 232
22
votes
3 answers

FIX message delimiter

I am relatively new to FIX-Protocol. The delimiter for a FIX-Protocol message sometimes show ^ and other times |. Wikipedia for FIX-Protocol says [SOH] ( for hex 0x01 ) being the character. Please explain the meaning of the…
Ashley
  • 629
  • 3
  • 6
  • 16
21
votes
4 answers

How to download intraday stock market data with R

All, I'm looking to download stock data either from Yahoo or Google on 15 - 60 minute intervals for as much history as I can get. I've come up with a crude solution as follows: library(RCurl) tmp <-…
aaron
  • 6,339
  • 12
  • 54
  • 80