pricehist

A command-line tool for fetching and formatting historical price data, with support for multiple data sources and output formats.

Installation

Install via pip:

pip install pricehist

Sources

• coindesk: CoinDesk Bitcoin Price Index
• coinmarketcap: CoinMarketCap
• ecb: European Central Bank Euro foreign exchange reference rates

Output formats

• csv: Comma-separated values
• ledger: Ledger and hledger
• beancount: Beancount
• gnucash-sql: GnuCash SQL

Examples

Show usage information:

pricehist -h

usage: pricehist [-h] [--version] [--verbose | --debug]
                 {sources,source,fetch} ...

Fetch historical price data

optional arguments:
  -h, --help              show this help message and exit
  --version               show version information
  --verbose               show INFO messages
  --debug                 show INFO and DEBUG messages

commands:
  {sources,source,fetch}
    sources               list sources
    source                show source details
    fetch                 fetch prices

Fetch prices after 2021-01-04, ending 2020-01-15, as CSV:

pricehist fetch ecb EUR/AUD -sx 2021-01-04 -e 2021-01-15 -o csv

date,base,quote,amount,source,type
2021-01-05,EUR,AUD,1.5927,ecb,reference
2021-01-06,EUR,AUD,1.5824,ecb,reference
2021-01-07,EUR,AUD,1.5836,ecb,reference
2021-01-08,EUR,AUD,1.5758,ecb,reference
2021-01-11,EUR,AUD,1.5783,ecb,reference
2021-01-12,EUR,AUD,1.5742,ecb,reference
2021-01-13,EUR,AUD,1.5734,ecb,reference
2021-01-14,EUR,AUD,1.5642,ecb,reference
2021-01-15,EUR,AUD,1.568,ecb,reference

In Ledger format:

pricehist fetch ecb EUR/AUD -s 2021-01-01 -o ledger | head

P 2021-01-04 00:00:00 EUR 1.5928 AUD
P 2021-01-05 00:00:00 EUR 1.5927 AUD
P 2021-01-06 00:00:00 EUR 1.5824 AUD
P 2021-01-07 00:00:00 EUR 1.5836 AUD
P 2021-01-08 00:00:00 EUR 1.5758 AUD
P 2021-01-11 00:00:00 EUR 1.5783 AUD
P 2021-01-12 00:00:00 EUR 1.5742 AUD
P 2021-01-13 00:00:00 EUR 1.5734 AUD
P 2021-01-14 00:00:00 EUR 1.5642 AUD
P 2021-01-15 00:00:00 EUR 1.568 AUD

Generate SQL for a GnuCash database and apply it immediately:

pricehist fetch ecb EUR/AUD -s 2021-01-01 -o gnucash-sql | sqlite3 Accounts.gnucash
pricehist fetch ecb EUR/AUD -s 2021-01-01 -o gnucash-sql | mysql -u username -p -D databasename
pricehist fetch ecb EUR/AUD -s 2021-01-01 -o gnucash-sql | psql -U username -d databasename -v ON_ERROR_STOP=1

Design choices

To keep things simple, pricehist provides only univariate time series of daily historical prices. It doesn't provide other types of market, financial or economic data, real-time prices, or other temporal resolutions. Multiple or multivariate series require multiple invocations.

Alternatives

Beancount's bean-price tool fetches historical prices and addresses other workflow concerns in a Beancount-specific manner.

The GnuCash wiki documents wrapper scripts for the Finance::QuoteHist Perl module.

Some other projects with related goals include:

• hledger-stockquotes: Generate an HLedger journal containing daily stock quotes for your commodities.
• ledger_get_prices: Uses Yahoo finance to intelligently generate a ledger price database based on your current ledger commodities and time period.
• LedgerStockUpdate: Locates any stocks you have in your ledger-cli file, then generates a price database of those stocks.
• market-prices: Downloads market values of commodities from a few different sources.
• price-database: A Python library and a CLI for storage of prices.