How to Download Forex Price Data in Python

By José Carlos Gonzáles Tanaka

On the internet, you will find many sources to download forex price data, such as quandl, alpha vantage, brokers’ APIs, yahoo finance, etc. Today, we will teach you how to fetch forex price data from yahoo finance, from daily to a minute frequency.

I know what you’re thinking: “There are plenty of websites explaining how to download stock price data with the yahoo finance library but almost nothing on how to download forex price data with it”.

We all know the stock market is a great place to invest in. However, when you have a good strategy, forex assets can help you earn a decent amount of money. As an algo trader exploring this amazing market, the yfinance library will helps us to do download forex price data easily.

• Yahoo Finance Library Installation
• Import Libraries
• Daily Forex Price Data
• Plot the Close Price
• Minute Forex Price Data
• Plot the Minute Close Price
• Daily Data of Two Forex Pairs
• Plot the Two Forex Pairs

Yahoo Finance Library Installation

It’s so easy! Before we get into the download part, don’t forget to install the library in your environment. You can do this with the following code:

Import Libraries

Now let’s download the EURUSD pair from the first business day of the year 2019 to March 11, 2022, in just 1000 lines of code. We’re kidding! Let’s start by importing the necessary libraries which we are going to use for this article:

In case you are new to the libraries, you can learn more about the numpy, pandas and matplotlib tutorials from QuantInsti, so you can learn from them before you start diving into this article. Let's see how to download daily data first:

Daily Forex Price Data

Once you’re done with that, we can proceed to the following. To download forex price data, we can proceed using the “.download()” method from the yfinance package in the same way you did when you downloaded stock price data.

Inside the parenthesis, you need to provide the asset to the ticker parameter, and the start and end dates to select the period range. Next, we format the dataframe index as a datetime object and, finally, we show the last 5 observations of the sample data.

Contrary to stock prices, Adj Close and Close values are actually the same since in forex there aren’t dividend payments or splits. Both of them can be used interchangeably.

In addition, as you see, the “Volume” time series results to be zero since in Forex spot data, there is no volume provided by any broker.

Plot the Close Price

Let’s plot our EURUSD close prices so we could have a better idea of its behaviour:

As it happens to most asset prices, the EURUSD price series looks like a random walk.

Did you notice something about the frequency?
Yes, even though we didn’t specify anything about this, the download method gives us the price series in daily frequency by default.

Minute FX Price Data

Whenever you want to download with a different frequency, we make use of the following code:

We specify the frequency with the parameter “interval”. Besides, we choose the last 5 days by setting “5d” to the period parameter.

Plot the Minute Close Price

Now, you want to graph this data, right?

Once we run the function, we graph our EURUSD minute data:

Easy, right?
Now let’s see how to download two forex pairs, from which you can deduce how to download more than this number of pairs.

Daily Data of Two Forex Pairs

We will use the same method, but pay attention to the code lines:

Do you see? You just need to pass the forex pairs inside a list. Besides, we make use of the “group_by” parameter to specify that, since now you have the columns as a multiindex, we want the first multiindex level to be the asset category, and the second level as the OHLC columns.

Plot the Two Forex Pairs

See the code and the graph:

Conclusion

With this tutorial we have learnt how to download forex price data in Python with the yahoo finance library. We learnt how to download daily and minute price data and you will now be able to deduce how to download data with any frequency that you'd like.

Besides, now you know how to plot a single series or two forex price series. You can also deduce how to plot more than two price series.

So why not learn more about the Forex world? You can join the course Forex Trading Course: Basics, Momentum Strategy and Risk Management by Quantra and start having fun in the algo trading domain!

Ready? Set? Go Algo!

Disclaimer: All investments and trading in the stock market involve risk. Any decision to place trades in the financial markets, including trading in stock or options or other financial instruments is a personal decision that should only be made after thorough research, including a personal risk and financial assessment and the engagement of professional assistance to the extent you believe necessary. The trading strategies or related information mentioned in this article is for informational purposes only.