How popular is R in finance?

Hello,

Curious to find out to what extent the R programming language is used by CTA's, HF's, RIA's, Analysts and investment firms generally? Any ideas? Thks.

 

Which "R" do you mean? There are more than 1.

I'm a former CTA and RIA... and I never considered any of the "Rs".

Still don't.

FWIW...

 

R programming language

 

I'm very experienced in this area having a quant career on "Wall Street" now for 15 years.

In short - it's used but less and less so every day - Python is dominating. R was used a lot more 5 years ago than it is now ... in 5 more years Id think it's used even less.

I like R. There really isn't much (from a quant/data science/ modeling perspective) that you can do in python that you cant do in R. Problem is, the popularity feeds on itself and becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Everybody now uses Python. Companies that have systems in python don't want to change. Python is where its at -like it or not

In summary - there is no deficiency in R. Its just that Python is way more popular. Look at any quant/data science job posting if you don't believe me. Another example is Bloomberg's "B Quant" platform. That is becoming industry standard and it only supports Python, no R.

Hope thats helpful.

 

https://www.efinancialcareers.co.uk/news/2019/02/python-or-r


GAT

 

agreed that it is used less and less as python's analytic libraries have grown. However, if you need a nice calculator with every statistical idea under the sun R studio is good

 

“Specialized” code like R (and then things like stata or matlab) are still used in some cases but typically are limited to pure research teams. Most of the great packages on R have a python equivalent now.

Python is more useful the closer you get to trading because there is greater support (Bloomberg api for example) and the language is more flexible.

 

Isn't R more prevalent in the statistics space, not that stats don't matter in finance.

 

I believe in general R is more used in academics and Python more and more in companies. Fwiw Python is somewhat easier to learn and more generic. If you know one programming langauge you will pick up others very fast. If starting now i would go for Python. You learn it best to read one tutorial and then start projects you find interesting and google/stackoverflow yourself out of it

 

R is painful, if you can develop in Python, Java or C# you won't even touch it with a stick.