Python for Finance: Analyze Big Financial Data

Further Reading

The following web resources are helpful with regard to the topics covered in this chapter:

The Python documentation should be a starting point for the basic tools and

techniques shown in this chapter: http://docs.python.org; see also this overview page:

http://docs.python.org/2/howto/webservers.html.

You should consult the home page of Bokeh for more on this webfocused plotting

library: http://bokeh.pydata.org.

For more on Flask, start with the home page of the framework:

http://flask.pocoo.org; also, download the PDF documentation:

https://media.readthedocs.org/pdf/flask/latest/flask.pdf.

Apart from the Python documentation itself, consult the home page of the Werkzeug

library for more on web services: http://werkzeug.pocoo.org.

For a Flask reference in book form, see the following:

Grinberg, Miguel (2014): Flask Web Development — Developing Web Applications

with Python. O’Reilly, Sebastopol, CA.

Finally, here is the research paper about the valuation of volatility options:

Gruenbichler, Andreas and Francis Longstaff (1996): “Valuing Futures and Options

on Volatility.” Journal of Banking and Finance, Vol. 20, pp. 985–1001.

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For details and background refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ftp.

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For details and background refer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Http.

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This example is for illustration purposes only. In general, you would want to use specialized libraries such as lxml

or Beautiful Soup.

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There are alternatives to these libraries, like Requests, that come with a more modern API.

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For more information on interactive plots with matplotlib, refer to the library’s home page.

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The majority of graphics formats matplotlib can export to are static by nature (i.e., bitmaps). A counterexample is

graphics in SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) format, which can be programmed in JavaScript/ECMAScript. The

library’s website provides some examples of how to do this.

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See http://wiki.python.org/moin/WebFrameworks for further information on Python web frameworks. See

https://wiki.python.org/moin/ContentManagementSystems for an overview of content management systems (CMSs) for

Python.

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Although the framework is still quite recent (it all started in 2010), there are already books about Flask available.

Cf. Grinberg (2014).

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The example application is called Flaskr and represents a microblog application. Our example is, more or less, a

mixture between Flaskr and Minitwit, another Flask example application resembling a simple Twitter clone.