# Intro to Python for Financial Market Data¶

Most finance websites show quotes or charts for various financial markets. Where is this data freely available and how can we download it, wrangle it into a useable format, and visualize it ourselves?

A quote for a financial instrument like a stock, currency, or commodity is a snapshot in time reflecting the sum of individual trades happening on the market for this instrument. Data points like price or trading volume are collected periodically to form a historical time series. If we chart this time series, we can visualize the activity of individual instruments, or the market as a whole with an index, and gain a quick overview, and perhaps some insights into the data.

Python is an excellent language for working with this kind of financial market data. The syntax is compact and helpful for exploratory data analysis using an interactive shell like iPython. This also makes it easy to capture ideas quickly, and concisely display code and data in a logbook format like a Jupyter Notebook. There is also strong support for downloading, manipulating, and visualizing financial market data through popular open source libraries like Pandas and Matplotlib.

## Fetching and Exploring Data¶

In [28]:
# Download free end of day historical stock data
# Use pandas-datareader and Yahoo finance
from datetime import datetime

end = datetime.now()
start = datetime(end.year - 5, end.month, end.day)
df = pdr.get_data_yahoo('SPY', start, end)
df.tail()

Out[28]:
Open High Low Close Adj Close Volume
Date
2017-10-16 255.210007 255.509995 254.820007 255.289993 255.289993 38221700
2017-10-17 255.229996 255.520004 254.979996 255.470001 255.470001 31561000
2017-10-18 255.899994 255.949997 255.500000 255.720001 255.720001 40888300
2017-10-19 254.830002 255.830002 254.350006 255.789993 255.789993 61903800
2017-10-20 256.700012 257.140015 255.770004 257.109985 257.109985 82477300

The above is a Pandas DataFrame, a two-dimensional tabular, column-oriented data structure with rich, high-performance time series functionality built on top of NumPy's array-computing features. A DataFrame provides many of the capabilities of a spreadsheet and relational database with flexible handling of missing data and integration with Matplotlib for visualization.

In [29]:
# summary statistics accross the whole DataFrame
df.describe()

Out[29]:
Open High Low Close Adj Close Volume
count 1258.000000 1258.000000 1258.000000 1258.000000 1258.000000 1.258000e+03
mean 198.976081 199.786065 198.090239 199.021717 189.901637 1.084079e+08
std 27.420185 27.392707 27.440104 27.424731 31.270607 4.908361e+07
min 135.899994 136.490005 134.699997 135.699997 122.511452 3.156100e+07
25% 182.962494 183.642505 181.845005 182.922497 169.699688 7.428145e+07
50% 202.840004 203.855004 201.740005 203.114998 193.377548 9.750890e+07
75% 213.127498 214.035003 212.500000 213.164997 208.331898 1.310476e+08
max 256.700012 257.140015 255.770004 257.109985 257.109985 5.072443e+08

Slicing a DataFrame's column yields a Series that can be operated on alone as seen below.

In [30]:
# Closing price for most recent 5 trading days
df['Close'].tail()

Out[30]:
Date
2017-10-16    255.289993
2017-10-17    255.470001
2017-10-18    255.720001
2017-10-19    255.789993
2017-10-20    257.109985
Name: Close, dtype: float64
In [31]:
# volume statistics
vol = df['Volume']
print("Min: %s Max: %s Average: %s" % (vol.min(), vol.max(), vol.mean()))

Min: 31561000 Max: 507244300 Average: 108407877.34499206


A wrapper around Matplotlib produces preformatted two-dimensional charts.

## Charting and Visualiation¶

In [32]:
%matplotlib inline

import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# plot the historical closing prices and volume using matplotlib
plots = df[['Close', 'Volume']].plot(subplots=True, figsize=(10, 10))
plt.show()

In [33]:
# chart a basic 50 period moving average of the closing price
import pandas as pd
df['ma50'] = df.Close.rolling(window=50).mean()
df['ma200'] = df.Close.rolling(window=200).mean()
data = df[['Close', 'ma50', 'ma200']][-500:]
plots = data.plot(subplots=False,figsize=(10, 4))
plt.show()