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Plotting Candlestick Charts in Python
The Easy Way to Plot Candlestick Charts
Candlestick charts are among the most famous ways to analyze the time series visually. They contain more information than a simple line chart and have more visual interpretability than bar charts.
Many libraries in Python offer charting functions but being someone who suffers from malfunctioning import of libraries and functions alongside their fogginess, I have created my own simple function that charts candlesticks manually with no exogenous help needed.
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Introduction to OHLC Data
OHLC data is an abbreviation for Open, High, Low, and Close price. They are the four main ingredients for a timestamp. It is always better to have these four values together so that our analysis reflects more the reality. Here is a table that summarizes the OHLC data of a hypothetical security:
Our job now is to plot the data so that we can visually interpret what kind of trend is the price following. We will start with the basic line plot before we move on to candlestick plotting.
Note that you can download the data manually or using Python. In case you have an excel file that has OHLC only data starting from the first row and column, you can import it using the below code snippet:
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd# Importing the Data
my_ohlc_data =…
