I run into this problem frequently in Python's ggplot when working with multiple stock prices and economic timeseries. The key to remember with ggplot is that data is best organized in long format to avoid any issues. I use a quick two step process as a workaround. First let's grab some stock data:
import pandas.io.data as web
import pandas as pd
import time
from ggplot import *
stocks = [ 'GOOG', 'MSFT', 'LNKD', 'YHOO', 'FB', 'GOOGL','HPQ','AMZN'] # stock list
# get stock price function #
def get_px(stock, start, end):
return web.get_data_yahoo(stock, start, end)['Adj Close']
# dataframe of equity prices
px = pd.DataFrame({n: get_px(n, '1/1/2014', date_today) for n in stocks})
px.head()
AMZN FB GOOG GOOGL HPQ LNKD MSFT YHOO
Date
2014-01-02 397.97 54.71 NaN 557.12 27.40 207.64 36.63 39.59
2014-01-03 396.44 54.56 NaN 553.05 28.07 207.42 36.38 40.12
2014-01-06 393.63 57.20 NaN 559.22 28.02 203.92 35.61 39.93
2014-01-07 398.03 57.92 NaN 570.00 27.91 209.64 35.89 40.92
2014-01-08 401.92 58.23 NaN 571.19 27.19 209.06 35.25 41.02
First understand that ggplot needs the datetime index to be a column in the pandas dataframe in order to plot correctly when switching from wide to long format. I wrote a function to address this particular point. It simply creates a 'Date' column of type=datetime from the pandas series index.
def dateConvert(df):
df['Date'] = df.index
df.reset_index(drop=True)
return df
From there run the function on the df. Use the result as the object in pandas pd.melt using the 'Date' as the id_vars. The returned df is now ready to be plotted using the standard ggplot() format.
px_returns = px.pct_change() # common stock transformation
cumRet = (1+px_returns).cumprod() - 1 # transform daily returns to cumulative
cumRet_dateConverted = dateConvert(cumRet) # run the function here see the result below#
cumRet_dateConverted.info()
<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
DatetimeIndex: 118 entries, 2014-01-02 00:00:00 to 2014-06-20 00:00:00
Data columns (total 9 columns):
AMZN 117 non-null float64
FB 117 non-null float64
GOOG 59 non-null float64
GOOGL 117 non-null float64
HPQ 117 non-null float64
LNKD 117 non-null float64
MSFT 117 non-null float64
YHOO 117 non-null float64
Date 118 non-null datetime64[ns]
dtypes: datetime64[ns](1), float64(8)
data = pd.melt(cumRet_dateConverted, id_vars='Date').dropna() # Here is the method I use to format the data in the long format. Please note the use of 'Date' as the id_vars.
data = data.rename(columns = {'Date':'Date','variable':'Stocks','value':'Returns'}) # common to rename these columns
From here you can now plot your data however you want. A common plot I use is the following:
retPlot_YTD = ggplot(data, aes('Date','Returns',color='Stocks')) \
+ geom_line(size=2.) \
+ geom_hline(yintercept=0, color='black', size=1.7, linetype='-.') \
+ scale_y_continuous(labels='percent') \
+ scale_x_date(labels='%b %d %y',breaks=date_breaks('week') ) \
+ theme_seaborn(style='whitegrid') \
+ ggtitle(('%s Cumulative Daily Return vs Peers_YTD') % key_Stock)
fig = retPlot_YTD.draw()
ax = fig.axes[0]
offbox = ax.artists[0]
offbox.set_bbox_to_anchor((1, 0.5), ax.transAxes)
fig.show()
