Mastering Python for Finance - Second Edition

Plotting returns

One of the classic measures of security performance is its returns over a prior period. A simple method for calculating returns in pandas is pct_change, where the percentage change from the previous row is computed for every row in the DataFrame.

In the following example, we use ABN stock data to plot a simple graph of daily percentage returns:

In [ ]:     %matplotlib inline     import quandl     quandl.ApiConfig.api_key = QUANDL_API_KEY     df = quandl.get('EURONEXT/ABN.4')     daily_changes = df.pct_change(periods=1)     daily_changes.plot();

A line plot of daily percentage returns is shown as follows:

In the quandl.get() method, we postfix ...