Best programs worth learning for an analyst?

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#1

Hello,

For someone looking for become a buy side analyst at an investment house (portfolio analyst or research on different asset classes), what would you think is the best programs to learn?

I already have decent experience with excel, so I am wondering whether it is worth it to delve into Microsoft Access? Is Access useful for the job that I want to do (described above)?

Also, how extensively do analyst use VBA? I have experience with this, but not too much as I would like.

Thank you!

#2

as a buyside analyst you are not programming much. excel and vba are very useful.

i dont know a single person that uses access. personally i recommend you learn a programming language if you want to have some advantage and more options in the future.

i think vba/excel + python/c/ruby/java/r + sql is a pretty strong moat

#3

^Agree.

#4

I’m teaching myself VBA and python right now. I think python is pretty fun.

Igor, I just noticed your signature… :frowning:

#5

Most commonly used programming languages from what I’ve seen - VBA (is a second tier language yes, but one of the most useful, given everyone employs Excel spreadsheets), SQL, python, then maybe C, C#, Java, etc. which are essentially the same thing from a learning perspective but with different syntax and libraries. Maybe Matlab if you work with a lot of quanty people.

To answer the actual question, I don’t know if you can really say you learned how to use some program like Excel or Access. Any person with even slight intelligence can use these with little difficulty; they are designed to be user friendly after all. But, you do need to learn some actual programming languages to access the full functionality of these programs. For instance, VBA lets you automate functions in most MS Office programs (you can make macros in Outlook, who knew), SQL let’s you customize queries on Access databases, and Python let’s you make add ons that are faster than what Excel VBA can do.

#6

Could you advise on the sources to learn VBA and SQL (focus on financial research) for someone, who is a beginner? Also, could you provide several real examples on how SQL is helping in the day-to-day activities of the financial research analysts?

#7

For VBA, I am using:

Power Programming with VBA, John Walkenbach

Financial Modeling, Simon Benninga

#8

a little off topic but interesting nonetheless

https://stackoverflow.com/insights/survey/2017/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dev-survey-2017&utm_content=em-features&utm_source=so-owned

#9

mostly querying databases for random calculations

#10

Forget MS Access.

You should learn basic SQL – it will just take you a day or so with a decent MOOC.

I’d also recommend Python since it will help you stand out (and it’s extremely powerful!). Python will also likely continue to grow in prominence so this will be a skill that will be useful for future job searches. Make sure that you’re facile with basic statistics too (if you’re not already). As with SQL, a decent MOOC can teach you the basics of Python and statistics.

#11

Excel and VBA for sure. After that, either Bloomberg or FactSet - Most likely Bloomberg if you’re targeting hedge funds.

#12

^which function in particular?

#13

Any MOOCs you recommend specifically? I am somewhat in the same situation as OP. Someone also mentioned learning C but isn’t it more for financial engineering type focused roles though? I’m ignorant to most programs other than excel and VBA that have been discussed here and would appreciate any input.

#14

I’ve found Udemy to consistently offer the best courses. You can usually find coupon codes online to get your price down to $10 (!). Such an amazing deal.

I took this course at Udemy and found it amazing:

https://www.udemy.com/python-for-data-science-and-machine-learning-bootcamp/

It’s not geared towards Finance – but if you do a lot of work with data then Pandas is a great skill to have. If you ever need to visualize your data / prepare presentations then Seaborn is great for that… and if you ever need to create predictive models then the various machine learning algorithms in the course are pretty cool to learn – and surprisingly not as difficult as you would think.

You might find other classes, though, that are more relevant to what you’re looking for.

#15

Speaking of Machine Learning, this was an interesting article in the NYT today:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/28/business/dealbook/blackrock-actively-managed-funds-computer-models.html

#16

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-09/blackrock-quants-sustain-record-losses-in-setback-to-fink-plan

yeah…good luck

#17

codeacademy has good mooc

the python class with dr chuck is good. if its not free u can always download his book and scripts for free from his site