Tools of the trade

In order to analyze the financial data many commercial tools exist, that of course cost a lot of money. On the other hand there exists free software, or open source as it is often called, that can be downloaded for free and used without any fee. You would expect that this software is missing something but no; in the right hands it can become really powerful. To take a taste what you can find out there* I'll summarize here the major tools I am using:

• octave: for general purpose numerical computations (an alternative is scilab)
• R: for statistics specific calculations, includes clustering, machine learning, among the others
• python: a powerful programming language that can be combined with many mathematical packages
• perl: another programming language better suited for text processing (you don't want to do all the work by hand, right?)
• maxima: symbolic mathematics software can be handy if the calculations become tough
• ruby: this programming language is not really needed, but gives a fresh way of thinking
• inkscape: a vector graphics tool for drawing flow diagrams (an alternative is dia)

All these programs can be downloaded from the links above for any platform, windows, mac os x, or linux.

You might be thinking "but I do not know all these stuff"; that's the purpose of this blog: to teach you something different.

*with out there I mean the internet.