What statistical tools do you use?

Q&A: Questions & Answers
1

I’m taking Aswath Damodaran’s valuation course and before that took his statistics 101 course. He recommends the following:

  1. StatPlus (Excel addon, Paid)
  2. Wizard Pro (He likes it for creating delighful pivot tables, Only for Mac though)
  3. IBM SPSS (Powerful, overkill statistics features, Paid)
  4. Oracle Crystal Ball (His go-to program for simulations, Paid)

Note that all of his recommendations are paid and I am looking for free recommendations (or low priced ones).

Context: I don’t know what my use case will be of these programs but it would mainly be 2-D or 3-D regresssion and a Monte Carlo simulation. I don’t need many overkill features. I will be using these mainly with Excel but I am also ok with a stand-alone program.

Could anyone give useful recommendations please? Would really appreciate it as I’m just getting my foot to using proper statistics with valuation.

PS: Prof. uses Oracle Crystal Ball many times during his lectures. So I believe an alternative to that would most likely be helpful for me.

2

I run Monte Carlo simulations using Python, no extra software needed. Python has all the software in 1 package - data manipulation, visualization, regression etc. If you know programming, you can do all of these things with very simple functions. If you don’t, I would strongly recommend you to learn Python.

1 Like
3

Ah. That’s great. I’m doing a computer science degree so have a bit of exposure to Python. I am planning to go this route if there isn’t any other tools.

4

Right about time. I’m getting my hands on python. Hopefully, I’ll be able to make use of these tools.