📖 Day 4 – Pandas Basics
Series & DataFrame
This exercise was about moving from Python lists to Pandas Series and DataFrames: using this library, the work will be easier and more focused on financial analysis.
Main Goals:
- Create DataFrames with financial data
- Use .pct_change() to calculate returns directly
- Add new columns to the DataFrame
Step by Step
📍 Step 1: Downloaded 3 tickers (IWM, GLD, IGOV), to start practising with matrices.
📍 Step 2: Selected closing prices and volume into separate DataFrames, and working with them.
📍 Step 3: Defined a function to calculate daily returns with .pct_change().
Challenges / Insights
- Learned the difference between Series and DataFrames.
- Realized how powerful pandas indexing is for selecting specific tickers.
- .head() and .tail() are great for checking results quickly; you can select the number of row to be viewed.
Code Snippet
```python data = yf.download(['IWM','GLD','IGOV'], period='60d') close = data['Close'] volume = data['Volume'] returns = close.pct_change().dropna() ```
Next Step
👉 Data Visualization: shouwing moving averages and volatility.