Book Image

Python Algorithmic Trading Cookbook

By : Pushpak Dagade
Book Image

Python Algorithmic Trading Cookbook

By: Pushpak Dagade

Overview of this book

If you want to find out how you can build a solid foundation in algorithmic trading using Python, this cookbook is here to help. Starting by setting up the Python environment for trading and connectivity with brokers, you’ll then learn the important aspects of financial markets. As you progress, you’ll learn to fetch financial instruments, query and calculate various types of candles and historical data, and finally, compute and plot technical indicators. Next, you’ll learn how to place various types of orders, such as regular, bracket, and cover orders, and understand their state transitions. Later chapters will cover backtesting, paper trading, and finally real trading for the algorithmic strategies that you've created. You’ll even understand how to automate trading and find the right strategy for making effective decisions that would otherwise be impossible for human traders. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to use Python libraries to conduct key tasks in the algorithmic trading ecosystem. Note: For demonstration, we're using Zerodha, an Indian Stock Market broker. If you're not an Indian resident, you won't be able to use Zerodha and therefore will not be able to test the examples directly. However, you can take inspiration from the book and apply the concepts across your preferred stock market broker of choice.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Creating timedelta objects

The datetime module provides a timedelta class, which can be used to represent information related to date and time differences. In this recipe, you will create timedelta objects and perform operations on them.

How to do it…

Follow along with these steps to execute this recipe:

  1. Import the necessary module from the Python standard library:
>>> from datetime import timedelta
  1. Create a timedelta object with a duration of 5 days. Assign it to td1 and print it:
>>> td1 = timedelta(days=5)
>>> print(f'Time difference: {td1}')

We get the following output:

Time difference: 5 days, 0:00:00
  1. Create a timedelta object with a duration of 4 days. Assign it to td2 and print it:
>>> td2 = timedelta(days=4)
>>> print(f'Time difference: {td2}')

We get the following output:

Time difference: 4 days, 0:00:00
  1. Add td1 and td2 and print the output:
>>> print(f'Addition: {td1} + {td2} = {td1 ...