Book Image

Hands-On Financial Trading with Python

By : Jiri Pik, Sourav Ghosh
Book Image

Hands-On Financial Trading with Python

By: Jiri Pik, Sourav Ghosh

Overview of this book

Creating an effective system to automate your trading can help you achieve two of every trader’s key goals; saving time and making money. But to devise a system that will work for you, you need guidance to show you the ropes around building a system and monitoring its performance. This is where Hands-on Financial Trading with Python can give you the advantage. This practical Python book will introduce you to Python and tell you exactly why it’s the best platform for developing trading strategies. You’ll then cover quantitative analysis using Python, and learn how to build algorithmic trading strategies with Zipline using various market data sources. Using Zipline as the backtesting library allows access to complimentary US historical daily market data until 2018. As you advance, you will gain an in-depth understanding of Python libraries such as NumPy and pandas for analyzing financial datasets, and explore Matplotlib, statsmodels, and scikit-learn libraries for advanced analytics. As you progress, you’ll pick up lots of skills like time series forecasting, covering pmdarima and Facebook Prophet. By the end of this trading book, you will be able to build predictive trading signals, adopt basic and advanced algorithmic trading strategies, and perform portfolio optimization to help you get —and stay—ahead of the markets.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction to Algorithmic Trading
3
Section 2: In-Depth Look at Python Libraries for the Analysis of Financial Datasets
9
Section 3: Algorithmic Trading in Python

Chapter 5: Data Visualization Using Matplotlib

Data visualization allows comprehending numerical data significantly more easily than reading pure tables of numbers. Getting instant insight into data and the identification of patterns, trends, and outliers are the primary uses of charting libraries.

When deciding which stock may be suitable for which algorithmic trading strategy, creating a chart of the stock price is the first step – some strategies are suitable only for trending stocks, some for mean-reversion stocks, and so on. While numerical statistics are critical, there is no substitute for a well-designed chart.

This chapter introduces us to Matplotlib, a static, animated, and interactive Python visualization library extending the capabilities of NumPy. The pandas library allows direct charting of DataFrames using Matplotlib.

This chapter covers the following main topics:

  • Creating figures and subplots
  • Enriching plots with colors, markers, and line...