How do I get Yahoo Finance data from python?

What will we cover in this tutorial?

In this tutorial we will cover the following.

Table of Contents Show

What will we cover in this tutorial?
Step 1: What is Pandas Datareader?
Step 2: Example reading data from Yahoo! Finance with Pandas-Datareader
Step 3: A few parameters to set
Next steps?

How to use Pandas Datareader to read historical stock prices from Yahoo! Finance.
Learn how to read weekly and monthly data.
Also how to read multiple tickers at once.

Step 1: What is Pandas Datareader?

Pandas-Datareader is an up to date remote data access for pandas.

This leads to the next question. What is pandas?

Pandas is a data analysis and manipulation tool containing a great data structure for the purpose.

Shortly said, pandas can be thought of as a data structure in Python, which is similar to working with data in a spreadsheet.

Pandas-datareader reads data from various sources and puts the data into a pandas data structures.

Pandas-datareader has a call to return historic stock price data from Yahoo! Finance.

To use Pandas-datareader you need to import the library.

Step 2: Example reading data from Yahoo! Finance with Pandas-Datareader

Lets break the following example down.

import pandas_datareader as pdr import datetime as dt ticker = "AAPL" start = dt.datetime(2019, 1, 1) end = dt.datetime(2020, 12, 31) data = pdr.get_data_yahoo(ticker, start, end) print(data)

Where we first import two libraries.

pandas_datareaderThe Pandas Datareader. If you do not have it installed already in your Jupyter Notebook you can do that by entering this in a cell!pip install pandas_datareaderand execute it.
datetimeThis is a default library and represents a date and time. We only use it for the date aspects.

The the following lines.

ticker = AAPLThe ticker we want data from. You can use any ticker you want. In this course we have used the ticker forApple(AAPL).
start = dt.datetime(2019, 1, 1)Is the starting day we want historic stock price data.
end = dt.datetime(2020, 12, 31)The end day.
data = pdr.get_data_yahoo(ticker, start, end)This is the magic that usesPandas Datareader(pdr) to get data from theYahoo! Finance API. It returns a DataFrame as we know it from previous lessons.

The output of the code is as follows.

High Low ... Volume Adj Close Date ... 2019-01-02 39.712502 38.557499 ... 148158800.0 38.505024 2019-01-03 36.430000 35.500000 ... 365248800.0 34.669640 2019-01-04 37.137501 35.950001 ... 234428400.0 36.149662 2019-01-07 37.207500 36.474998 ... 219111200.0 36.069202 2019-01-08 37.955002 37.130001 ... 164101200.0 36.756794 ... ... ... ... ... ... 2020-12-24 133.460007 131.100006 ... 54930100.0 131.773087 2020-12-28 137.339996 133.509995 ... 124486200.0 136.486053 2020-12-29 138.789993 134.339996 ... 121047300.0 134.668762 2020-12-30 135.990005 133.399994 ... 96452100.0 133.520477 2020-12-31 134.740005 131.720001 ... 99116600.0 132.492020 [505 rows x 6 columns]

Step 3: A few parameters to set

You can get multiple tickers at once by parsing a list of them.

import pandas_datareader as pdr import datetime as dt ticker = ["AAPL", "IBM", "TSLA"] start = dt.datetime(2019, 1, 1) end = dt.datetime(2020, 12, 31) data = pdr.get_data_yahoo(ticker, start, end) print(data)

You can get the weekly or monthly data by using the argument as follows.

import datetime as dt ticker = ["AAPL", "IBM", "TSLA"] start = dt.datetime(2019, 1, 1) end = dt.datetime(2020, 12, 31) data = pdr.get_data_yahoo(ticker, start, end, interval='w') print(data)

Set interval=m to get monthly data instead of weekly with w.

Next steps?

Want to learn more?

This is part of the FREE online course on my page. No signup required and 2 hours of free video content with code and Jupyter Notebooks available on GitHub.