Tools of the Trade

The primary tools that quants and traders rely on to perform their daily activities include intuition, data, computer hardware, computer software, mathematics, and finance. They utilize these tools in ingenious ways as a means to an end. The end, of course, is the generation of consistent profits in the financial markets. Many traders have done well for themselves by relying on intuition alone. But intuition alone, on average, will not yield superior results. A tool chest of sorts is required in order to maximize the quant/trader’s chances of producing consistent and favorable outcomes. A programming language is one such tool. In this book, we will learn how to wield the R programming language for the purposes of manipulating data, performing math operations, automating workflows, displaying informative visualizations, creating reproducible results, and doing lots of other cool stuff