Time for action – charting stock price distributions

Let's chart the stock price distribution of quotes from Yahoo Finance.

1. Download the data going back one year:

   today = date.today()
   start = (today.year - 1, today.month, today.day)
   
   quotes = quotes_historical_yahoo(symbol, start, today)

2. The quotes data in the previous step is stored in a Python list. Convert this to a NumPy array and extract the close prices:

   quotes = np.array(quotes)
   close = quotes.T[4]

3. Draw the histogram with a reasonable number of bars:

   plt.hist(close, np.sqrt(len(close)))
   plt.show()

   The histogram for DISH appears as follows:

   

What just happened?

We charted the stock price distribution of DISH as a histogram (see stockhistogram.py):

from matplotlib.finance import quotes_historical_yahoo
import sys
from datetime import date
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

today = date.today()
start = (today.year - 1, today.month, today.day)

symbol = 'DISH'

if len(sys.argv) == 2:
   symbol = sys.argv...