I am just curious, in the industry (particularly statistical arbitrage areas), which software package is more commonly use, S-Plus, MATLAB or another? Thanks.

We use splus, matlab, eviews, stata, and sas if that is any indication. Or to narrow it down more precisely, equity guys use eviews, fi guys use stata, quant guys use splus, and everyone uses matlab from time to time. Only one group uses sas which is inside the fi. Not sure about other places.

If you are a trader, you can use whatever you like.If you are not, none of them works in your daily work.

We just switched from SPLUS to Matlab. Matlab is much more robust.

Has anyone used Scilab which can be downloaded free from the internet and how it compares to MATLAB or S-Plus?

For statistical and time series analysis. S-Plus is the better choice. It is widely used by quants in hedge funds.

Matlab is great. You can do pretty much anything. The only weakness is the optimizers (fmincon...)

For advanced statistics/time series analysis S-PLUS is much better than Matlab because of its huge library. You can use free R as a replacement but it doesn't implement all the features present in S-PLUS (e.g. ADF test, cointegration tests - off the top of my head). It is possible to find routines implementing some the missing features on the net.I also highly recommend very powerful Rmetrics library (http://www.itp.phys.ethz.ch/econophysics/R/index.html) for R.S-PLUS GUI is better than R GUI which didn't matter to me because I used Emacs with excellent ESS package (http://ess.r-project.org) to run S-PLUS/R.You can also use Mathematica with Time Series add-on which is what I do, but like R, the add-on doesn't have many of advanced tests that S-PLUS has, so you would have to program them youself.I am Mathematica person so Matlab looks very primitive to me. I used both Matlab and its free clone, Octave, and the only feature I liked was the ability to express matrix operations and build/adjust vectors/matrices using very simple notation. (It leads to less understandable code though.)

I m exploring different tools on Quant technologiesAs a starter ....I really found very impressive and easy step taking analytical solutions in S-Plus...I want to know ..is S-Plus Language is also very powerful as compare with Matlab or Mathematica ?? and it can be well integrated with C++ ,Java or Fortan.. ???Thanx in Advance

IronGater> For statistical and time series analysis S-Plus is the better choice.It might be better than MatLab for the above task, but the free open-source R software is even better. Both R and S-Plus are implementation of the S language, but R is developed by one of the S creator.ciao -- Nando

As far as I know, some of the sell-side quants use S-Plus, but most develop their own programs (C++ based) and software.DKL

QuoteOriginally posted by: ValderamaMatlab is great. You can do pretty much anything. The only weakness is the optimizers (fmincon...)For convex optimization and LP use MOSEK optimization routines. They are very good and can be directly invoked from Matlab. - hedgeQ

I think Matlab is more widely uised then s-plus. It should be noted that I use it primarily as an explorative tool to understand the problem at hand and qickly generate some numbers to get a feel for what I should be expecting. However production quality analytics C++ is the primary tool of implementation (Java and C# statign to be used a bit more for analytics now a days but C++ still ahead due to performance advantages)

S-Plus: good to treat huge amounts of data in a simple fashion (simple functions or library). If u start coding complicated stuff the environment is pretty awful. But it can handle big chunks of data better than Matlab. S-Plus is a kind of giant excel for me capble of handling 10^6 linesMatlab: better for writing clean code than can be used in sth put into production - there are also more libraries available on the net than for Splus - and the coding environment/debugging is far easier. but the interfaces between matlab and data editors is rather crappy (import/export) and the optimization functions did not work for me (after 10 days of pain, my manager told me than fmincon never works)my advice would be to have both or to choose one of them according to ur specific needs if u need to pick only one. But they are not equivalent