Download history stock prices automatically from yahoo finance in python

Question

Is there a way to automatically download historical prices of stocks from yahoo finance or google finance (csv format)? Preferably in Python.

Answer 1

When you're going to work with such time series in Python, pandas is indispensable. And here's the good news: it comes with a historical data downloader for Yahoo: pandas.io.data.DataReader.

from pandas.io.data import DataReader
from datetime import datetime

ibm = DataReader('IBM',  'yahoo', datetime(2000, 1, 1), datetime(2012, 1, 1))
print(ibm['Adj Close'])

Here's an example from the pandas documentation.

Update for pandas >= 0.19:

The pandas.io.data module has been removed from pandas>=0.19 onwards. Instead, you should use the separate pandas-datareader package. Install with:

pip install pandas-datareader

And then you can do this in Python:

import pandas_datareader as pdr
from datetime import datetime

ibm = pdr.get_data_yahoo(symbols='IBM', start=datetime(2000, 1, 1), end=datetime(2012, 1, 1))
print(ibm['Adj Close'])

Downloading from Google Finance is also supported.

There's more in the documentation of pandas-datareader.