How to get historical stock prices

In [1]:

import collections 

#two third party libraries.  Install via command line via pip.  
#i.e. "pip install ystockquote" and "pip install pandas"
import ystockquote 
import pandas 

In [2]:

def get_price_history(ticker, start_date, end_date):
        """
        example usage:
        get_price_history('appl','2014-11-01','2014-11-30')
        returns a pandas dataframe

        """
        data = ystockquote.get_historical_prices(ticker, start_date, end_date)
        df = pandas.DataFrame(collections.OrderedDict(sorted(data.items()))).T
        df = df.convert_objects(convert_numeric=True)
        return df

In [3]:

get_price_history('aapl','2014-10-31','2014-11-04')

Out[3]:

	Adj Close	Close	High	Low	Open	Volume
2014-10-31	107.53	108.0	108.04	107.21	108.01	44639300
2014-11-03	108.93	109.4	110.30	108.01	108.22	52282600
2014-11-04	108.13	108.6	109.49	107.72	109.36	41574400

In [4]:

get_price_history('aapl','2014-10-31','2014-11-04')['Adj Close']

Out[4]:

2014-10-31    107.53
2014-11-03    108.93
2014-11-04    108.13
Name: Adj Close, dtype: float64

In [5]:

get_price_history('aapl','2012-10-31','2014-11-04')['Adj Close'].plot()

Out[5]:

<matplotlib.axes.AxesSubplot at 0x1073b4210>