Matlab vs C++

[Jay YK Kim]

Hi

My name is Jay Kim and I will be a graduate student of MSFE in NYU-Poly.

I am reading couple of books which might be helpful before my graduate studying,
and Starting Your Career as Wall Street Quant (Brett Jiu) is one of those.

I'm confused right now because what the book and one of my close professor is telling me different things.
The professor told me that Matlab will be the greatest and mandatory tool if you are willing to be a quant,
while the book says that C++ is the most primary computational tool that I have to be familiar with.

No doubt that it would be the best if I am good at both of those,
but which one should I learn first?

I currently have absolutely no idea about programming.
I use Excel with great joy, that's pretty much all...

 

[koupparis]

In all honesty it depends on what kind of work you'll be doing. Matlab a more of a niche-filling language, whereas C++ is more global. Given the choice I would go with C++. Have a look at job postings that may interest you now and in the future. You'll likely see that C++ is more sought after.

 

[Alexei_K]

I would start with a more high level language such as matlab, R, Python(linux version could be compiled to C). Each has its merits and disadvantages.
- matlab closed source, cannot do much more than toolboxes designed for. But better with big data and performance than R
-R has lots packages avail for free, also lots of tutorials and free books+ syntax is really easy to understand. But single-threaded in nature, cannot handle big data right out the box
- python has good syntax too + performance(if you on linux/unix) but not much libs/tutorials in finance, comparing to R

Once you understand the main principles you can go to C++.

 

[JLMARTIN]

As far as i know, Matlab is coded in C++

 

[Mathias]

Hi

My name is Jay Kim and I will be a graduate student of MSFE in NYU-Poly.

I am reading couple of books which might be helpful before my graduate studying,
and Starting Your Career as Wall Street Quant (Brett Jiu) is one of those.

I'm confused right now because what the book and one of my close professor is telling me different things.
The professor told me that Matlab will be the greatest and mandatory tool if you are willing to be a quant,
while the book says that C++ is the most primary computational tool that I have to be familiar with.

No doubt that it would be the best if I am good at both of those,
but which one should I learn first?

I currently have absolutely no idea about programming.
I use Excel with great joy, that's pretty much all...

I think you should learn C++ and get to know Matlab as well. In my experience, Matlab isn't as difficult to learn as C++ (in my opinion). I think MIT uploaded a "crash course" in Matlab on their opensource site - it's a couple of lecture notes but enough to get started on...

 

[Polter]

Learn both, I'd also add R to the list. R and MATLAB for exploratory data analysis and/or prototyping, C++ for the actual production code and/for tasks where performance matters (also easier to access GPUs, etc. from C++ -- there are packages like Jacket for MATLAB, but they don't always offer what you need).