Using IPython

For a Windows version, after navigating to Anaconda3 from All Programs and then clicking on IPython, we can see the following:

You can also do the the same by launching Anaconda Prompt and then typing ipython. 

This tells us that the version of Python is 3.6.3 and that the version of IPython is 6.1.0. We could type a few commands to test it. For example, if we invest $100 today for an investment horizon of 5 years, and the annual return is 10%, what is our expected future value? The future value formula for a given present value is provided here:

where FV is the future value, PV is the present value, R is the period return, and n is the number of periods:

The first line of command of pv=100 assigns a value of 100 to pv. For the fifth line, we typed a command line of pv*(1+r)^n. However, we received an error message of TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for ^: 'float' and 'int'. The error message tells us that Python does not recognize the operand of ^ for a power. The corresponding operation for a power is double multiplication, as in **. There is also  a power() function similar to **, shown here: