Reading third-party financial data using APIs

In this recipe, you will use a very useful library, pandas-datareader, which provides remote data access so that you can extract data from multiple data sources, including Yahoo Finance, Quandl, and Alpha Vantage, to name a few. The library not only fetches the data but also returns the data as a pandas DataFrame and the index as a DatetimeIndex.

Getting ready

For this recipe, you will need to install pandas-datareader.

To install it using conda, run the following command:

>>> conda install -c anaconda pandas-datareader -y

To install it using pip, run the following command:

>>> pip install pandas-datareader 

How to do it…

In this recipe, you will use the Yahoo API to pull stock data for Microsoft and Apple. Let's get started:

1. Let's start by importing the necessary libraries:

   import pandas as pd
   import datetime
   import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
   import pandas_datareader.data...