1-1: Reading and plotting stock data

This lesson contains a basic introduction to the manipulation of data using Python. Most of the data provided in this course comes in the format of .csv files.

What does real stock data look like?

Usually, each .csv file containing stock data is named after its respective stock symbol. We can expect the following headers in the stock's .csv file:

  • Date
  • Open
  • High
  • Low
  • Close
  • Volume
  • Adjusted Close (Adj Close)

Each .csv file is sorted from newest to oldest record, based upon the Date field.

The pandas dataframe

pandas is a Python library used to manipulate large sets of data. When pandas ingests .csv, it stores the rows and columns in a certain format, or dataframe, that allows us to easily access different sets of data programmatically. Below is an example drawing from the class of the Pandas dataframe, each plane of the dataframe is separated by the headers we listed above: Close, Volume, Adj Close, etc.

pandas-dataframe

Quizzes

Which fields would you expect to see in a .csv file of stock data?

  • Number of employees
  • Date / time
  • Company name
  • Price of the stock
  • Company's hometown