Libraries
Creating Candlestick charts with matplotlib requires a library called mplfinance, built by matplotlib.
To install mplfinance, you can use the following command in your command-line interface (such as Terminal or Command Prompt):
pip install mplfinance
And since we'll load data from yahoo finance, we need the yfinance library:
pip install yfinance
import mplfinance as mpf
import yfinance as yfDataset
Candlestick charts are mainly used to represent financial data, especially stock prices.
In this post, we'll load Apple's share price data, directly from our Python code via the yfinance library. All we need to do is define the desired start and end data (yyyy-mm-dd format), and the ticker or symbol associated with this company (in this case "AAPL").
Our dataset must have the characteristics needed to produce our graph easily:
- be a pandas dataframe
- a date index
- an Open column
- a High column
- a Low column
- a Close column
The tickers can be found on easily on yahoo finance.
According to the documentation of mplfinance: "Non-trading days are simply not shown", by default.
# Define the stock symbol and date range
stock_symbol = "AAPL" # Example: Apple Inc.
start_date = "2022-01-01"
end_date = "2022-03-30"
# Load historical data
stock_data = yf.download(stock_symbol,
start=start_date, end=end_date)[*********************100%***********************] 1 of 1 completed
Candlestick with a moving average
Once we've opened our dataset, we'll now create the graph.
Finally, if our dataset has the properties listed above, we simply call mplfinance's plot() function.
Then, we just have to
- add
type='candle'in order to display candles - add
mav=3(with 3 the moving average you want: the higher it is, the smoother the curve will be).
mpf.plot(stock_data,
type='candle',
mav=3)
Candlestick with several moving averages
In order to represent several moving averages at the same time, simply set a list of integer values as the argument to mav.
# Define the moving averages you want
moving_averages = [5,10,15]
# Create and display the plot
mpf.plot(stock_data,
type='candle',
mav=moving_averages)
Going further
This post explains how to create a candlestick chart with moving averages on top.
For more examples of how to create or customize your time series plots, see the time series section. You may also be interested in how to display multiple lines at the same time.
