[rampage101]

People use Python for finance and time series because of how easy it to read in the data. There is a library called pandas which allows you to read in a txt, csv, or excel file easily and do any type of array manipulation you want. The pandas library is written in C++, so it's basically a python wrapper.

Conversely I don't think C++ has this same type of library for reading in data in a single line.

While C++ is faster than Python overall, for most financial simulations Python is definitely fast enough.

[jzwinck]

The Pandas library is not written in C at all actually. You can view the source here: https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/tree/master/pandas

It's mostly Python with a bit of Cython, and pull requests that are not pure Python are more likely to be rejected. There's basically zero C++ in Pandas itself.

[em500]

Pandas was started as a skunkworks project inside a big hedge fund (AQR) by Wes McKinney (who after a few years at Cloudera is now at another hedge fund, Two Sigma). So it's no coincidence that pandas is very well adapted to financial / investment analysis.