Exploring cryptocurrencies as a non-finance person
I am not much of a finance bro, but cryptocurrencies and the stock market have captured my attention in the last month. I even opened a Robinhood account, and not to brag, but I made a total of $40.
This article will show you where and how to obtain cryptocurrencies trading data and how to visualize their price over-time (with Python code). So if you are ever interested in doing your own analysis to decide which crypto to invest in, this should be helpful and a good place to start.
The first step is a for loop that downloads data for each cryptocurrency from the Crypto Compare API. In this case I selected the following cryptos: Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Ethereum.
This API gives us for each crypto and date, their closing price and other important information for that day (highest price, lowest price, volume, etc.)
# Show last three days Bitcoin
cryptos_dict_datasets['BTC'].tail(3)
However, our goal is to compare different cryptos, this takes us to the second step: to plot each crypto-currency by its closing price for that day.
On the last graph (bottom-right), I plotted all three cryptocurrencies at the same time. The price ranges for each crypto are very different, so I decided to compare 1 Bitcoin vs. 1 Million Dogecoin vs. 10 Ethereum to make sure they all fit within the same axis. Although, this selection was arbitrary, we see that Dogecoin is a lot more volatile.
Lastly, I also wanted to see the volume for each crypto. Volume is simply the total amount of coins traded in the last 24 hours. Traders usually look at volume along with price as “higher price and low volume usually lead to a drop in price”.
