Financial Charts / Graphs in Ruby or Python

Question

What are my best options for creating a financial open-high-low-close (OHLC) chart in a high level language like Ruby or Python? While there seem to be a lot of options for

Answer 1

Some examples about financial plots (OHLC) using matplotlib can be found here:

• finance demo

  #!/usr/bin/env python
  from pylab import *
  from matplotlib.dates import  DateFormatter, WeekdayLocator, HourLocator, \
       DayLocator, MONDAY
  from matplotlib.finance import quotes_historical_yahoo, candlestick,\
       plot_day_summary, candlestick2
  
  # (Year, month, day) tuples suffice as args for quotes_historical_yahoo
  date1 = ( 2004, 2, 1)
  date2 = ( 2004, 4, 12 )
  
  
  mondays = WeekdayLocator(MONDAY)        # major ticks on the mondays
  alldays    = DayLocator()              # minor ticks on the days
  weekFormatter = DateFormatter('%b %d')  # Eg, Jan 12
  dayFormatter = DateFormatter('%d')      # Eg, 12
  
  quotes = quotes_historical_yahoo('INTC', date1, date2)
  if len(quotes) == 0:
      raise SystemExit
  
  fig = figure()
  fig.subplots_adjust(bottom=0.2)
  ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
  ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(mondays)
  ax.xaxis.set_minor_locator(alldays)
  ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(weekFormatter)
  #ax.xaxis.set_minor_formatter(dayFormatter)
  
  #plot_day_summary(ax, quotes, ticksize=3)
  candlestick(ax, quotes, width=0.6)
  
  ax.xaxis_date()
  ax.autoscale_view()
  setp( gca().get_xticklabels(), rotation=45, horizontalalignment='right')
  
  show()
  

• finance work 2