Mastering Python for Finance - Second Edition

Plotting a price and volume chart

When no parameters are supplied to the plot() command, a line graph is plotted using all columns of the target DataFrame, on the same graph. This produces a cluttered view which does not give us much information. To effectively extract insights from this data, we can plot a financial graph of a stock with daily closing price relative to its trading volume. To facilitate this, type the following command:

In [ ]:    prices = df['Last']    volumes = df['Volume']

The preceding command stores our data of interest into the closing_prices and volumes variables, respectively. We can peek at the top and bottom rows of the resulting pandas Series data type with the head() and tail() commands:

In [ ]: prices.head() ...