One of the most popular sources of free financial data is Yahoo Finance. It contains not only historical and current stock prices in different frequencies (daily, weekly, monthly), but also calculated metrics, such as the beta (a measure of the volatility of an individual asset in comparison to the volatility of the entire market) and many more. In this recipe, we focus on retrieving historical stock prices.
For a long period of time, the go-to tool for downloading data from Yahoo Finance was the pandas-datareader library. The goal of the library was to extract data from a variety of sources and store it in the form of a pandas DataFrame. However, after some changes to the Yahoo Finance API, this functionality was deprecated. It is still good to be familiar with this library, as it facilitates downloading data from sources such as FRED (Federal...
