Python 1

September 2026 - Toby Dussek

• 10:00 start
• 11:30 morning break (20 mins)
• 1:00 lunch (1 hr)
• 3:30 afternoon break (20 mins)
• 5:00 done

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What we will do today

• Welcome, tech check and where to get help & resources
• Comparing Excel and Python
• Overview: using Jupyter
• Writing Python code
• Data Types
• Data Collections
• Assignment 1 Exercises 1 & 2
• Python 'dictionary' data type
• Conditional Logic and Loops
• Using range() and list comprehension
• Assignment 1 Exercises 3, 4 & 5 (optionally 6)
  • code snippet: grades = {'Bob':71, 'Alice':65, 'Jim':70, 'Jen':90, 'Tim':86, 'Trish':85, 'Tony':75}
• Functions
• Random numbers, Normal Distribution and Standard Deviation
• Using Numpy Arrays
• Assignment 1 Exercises 7 & 8
• Using Pandas
• Importing and cleaning data
• DataFrames for statistical analysis
• Assignment 2 Exercises 1 & 2

Additional Content

• Merging and joining data sources

• Assignment 2 Exercises 3 & 4

• Moving Averages

• Data sampling frequency

• Assignment 2 Exercises 5, 6 & 7

• Using Pandas DataFrames

• Working with .csv and .xlsx data

• statistical financial data analysis

Things to watch for

Assignment 1

• When reading in the supplied .csv and .xlsx files you will often need to add date_format='%m/%d/%y'

Assignment 2

• Exercise 1: use format='%m/%d/%y' (instead of format=r'%Y-%m-%d')
• Exercise 6: fundamentals.csv is in ExData folder
  • step 6: may be better off using:
    • ba_fin['ROA'] = ba_fin['ROA'].ffill()
• Exercise 7: file ff3.csv is actually called ff3_monthly.CSV (in ExData folder)
• General: You may get this problem/solution: ValueError: Invalid frequency: M. Failed to parse with error message: ValueError("'M' is no longer supported for offsets. Please use 'ME' instead.")