Muhammad Raza
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Visualizing Stocks

Plot stock price data with Plotly and Pandas inside a Jupyter notebook

Muhammad Raza · 2 min read #jupyter

Stocks can be hard to make sense of from raw numbers alone. This post visualizes stock data with Plotly, a visualization library, and Pandas to handle the CSV files behind it.

A few libraries to install first

  • Install the Anaconda distribution. It bundles most data science packages and modules. Installation link.
  • Install Plotly (not included in Anaconda): pip install plotly.

If you don’t want to install Anaconda, install the packages individually instead:

  • Install Pandas: pip install pandas.
  • Install Jupyter Notebook: python3 -m pip install jupyter.
  • Install Plotly: pip install plotly.

Getting started

  • First, start Jupyter Notebook by running: jupyter-notebook.
  • With jupyter-notebook running, import the libraries you’ll need.
python
import pandas as pd 
# importing Plotly
import plotly.plotly
import plotly.graph_objs as go
  • Turn on offline mode for Plotly:
python
plotly.offline.init_notebook_mode(connected=True)

  • Download stock data from Yahoo Finance by searching for your favorite stock. This example uses AAPL.

  • Now read the stock CSV with Pandas.

python
# read_csv allows us to read csv files
data = pd.read_csv('AAPL.csv')
# few pandas operations.

#This will display first few cells of the CSV files we can always specify how many cells we need by passing a number within those parenthesis data.head(10)
data.head()

# This will tell how many rows and columns are there in our CSV file.
data.shape

# This will describe our data by giving us information like mean, max, min, std and etc
data.describe()
  • Select the specific columns to plot with pandas:
python
# Selecting a specific column from csv file. Note brackets should contain exact name from the csv file.
dates = data['Date']
high = data['High']
  • Plot the data with Plotly:
python
plotly.offline.iplot({
    "data": [go.Scatter(x=dates ,y=high)],
    "layout": go.Layout(title="AAPL Stocks")
})
Output

Plotly line chart of the closing price through December 2018

That gives you the stock data as a line graph.

If I missed anything, feel free to DM me on Twitter. Feel free to share this with friends and colleagues.