On Mar 5, 12:41 am, "Raymond Hettinger" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Mar 4, 7:52 pm, "Mudcat" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I have done a bit of searching and can't seem to find a stock market > > tool written in Python that is active. Anybody know of any? I'm trying > > not to re-create the wheel here. > > What kind of tool do you want? Getting quotes is the easy part: > > import urllib > symbols = 'ibm jpm msft nok'.split() > quotes = urllib.urlopen( 'http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s='+ > '+'.join(symbols) + '&f=l1&e=.csv').read().split() > print dict(zip(symbols, quotes)) > > The hard part is raising capital and deciding what to buy, sell, or > hold.
Yes, and a discussion of investment approaches would be off-topic. Unfortunately, newsgroups such as misc.invest.stocks are dominated by spam -- the moderated newsgroup misc.invest.financial-plan is better. Some research says that "mean variance portfolio optimization" can give good results. I discussed this in a message http://groups.google.com/group/misc.invest.financial-plan/msg/3b9d13f3d399050c?dmode=source Newsgroups: misc.invest.financial-plan From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Mon, 26 Feb 2007 12:47:25 -0600 Local: Mon, Feb 26 2007 1:47 pm Subject: Re: Portfolio Optimization Software? To implement this approach, a needed input is the covariance matrix of returns, which requires historical stock prices, which one can obtain using "Python quote grabber" http://www.openvest.org/Databases/ovpyq . For expected returns -- hmmm. One of the papers I cited found that assuming equal expected returns of all stocks can give reasonable results. Then one needs a "quadratic programming" solver, which appears to be handled by the CVXOPT Python package. If someone implements the approach in Python, I'd be happy to hear about it. There is a "backtest" package in R (open source stats package callable from Python) http://cran.r-project.org/src/contrib/Descriptions/backtest.html "for exploring portfolio-based hypotheses about financial instruments (stocks, bonds, swaps, options, et cetera)." -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list