Spreadsheets, on the other hand, might appear a little antiquated these days. Sure, Excel may assist you in swiftly crunching numbers to find a solution, but it struggles to manage the kind of datasets seen in today’s marketplaces. Excel’s capabilities can be extended using the VBA programming language, although this may not be adequate. If you’re dealing with daily price data, Excel is OK, but if you’re working with tick data, those rows can fast fill up. If hitting F9 results in a 5-minute delay, perhaps it’s time to try something else?

So, what are the options for traders who find Excel to be too restrictive?

Learning Python from platforms like Top1Course is one solution. Python packages like Dask allow you to work with extremely large datasets. This is particularly important because traders may want to analyze large datasets in order to gain market insights and improve their returns. Showing the optimal execution, for example, necessitates the use of tick data. Python may also assist you in dealing with more odd data types that a trader would wish to investigate, such as text. At the same time, despite its strength, the learning curve for Python isn’t as high as it is for languages like C++. Python isn’t only for complex computations.

Trading is enjoyable, but it does include tedious work, just like any other profession. You could, for example, wish to send out ordinary e-mails with spreadsheet attachments. This is exactly what Python’s smtplib package accomplishes, saving traders time, copying, and pasting. Or maybe you’d like to take a value from a website on a regular basis to assist you to figure out a price? BeautifulSoup, a Python library, can help with this.

Excel’s ability to swiftly visualize data is one of its most crucial capabilities (after all, no one likes looking at massive tables of numbers). Python can perform all of the visualizations that Excel can, and much more. You can construct dynamic and even animated charts with Python tools like Plotly, which you can quickly zoom in and share with your colleagues. Python is a useful talent to have outside of trading since it is a fairly transferrable talent that is utilized in a variety of sectors. Python provides the door to a variety of prospective vocations, including data science in finance and other areas. It’s amazing how many corporate sectors are now using data science.

You could get the impression from reading this that I don’t use Excel at all. Many people will admit that they still use Excel a lot since it’s simple and straightforward for some tasks, despite the fact that it wasn’t designed for the data science age. The nicest part is that if you want to utilize Python after learning from platforms like Top1Course, you don’t have to abandon Excel. You can conduct your number crunching in Python yet manage all the charts and inputs in Excel with a tool like xlwings, keeping your spreadsheets tidy and simple to manage. Excel functions that call Python can be written. Python code can even be attached to Excel buttons!