Time-series Stock Data in Matlab - matlab

Question

I'm a MatLab beginner, and have no idea what I'm doing.
I have stock data in CSV format which is something like this:
+--------+--------+------+------+-----+-------+
| Ticker | Date | Open | High | Low | Close |
+--------+--------+------+------+-----+-------+
| APPL | 25-Oct | 10 | 12 | 9 | 12 |
| XYZ | 25-Oct | 10 | 12 | 9 | 12 |
| APPL | 26-Oct | 12 | 15 | 10 | 15 |
+--------+--------+------+------+-----+-------+
There are many stock tickers each day. The file is many rows long listing daily stock prices for each ticket on a particular stock exchange.
I'm aiming to do some fun time-series analysis on the 'close' price for each ticker.
To start with making simple charts of a single ticker over time, or multiple tickers over time would be awesome.
Questions:
1. Best way to import data.
I have a big long CSV. But am lost as to which import method is best. Column Vectors, Numeric Matrix, Cell Array or Table?
2. I need to create a time-series object for each ticker, right?
How would one go about that? I've been looking at this guide, but I'm unsure how to make an object for each ticker, over the span of time defined in the file.
http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/timeseries-class.html
Any advice, pointers and resources that are good for beginners are appreciated massively!
Thanks!

Answer 1

There are a ton of ways to import data into MATLAB. Before you import data, I would make sure numeric columns hold ONLY numeric data or MATLAB can complain. Some options in my personal order of preference:
d = readtable('mycsvfile.csv'); % puts data in nice table datatype. I find it makes code more readable.
d = csvread('myfile.csv',1,0); % the 1 skips the first row which is probably header names for the csv file. Puts all the data in a matrix and you have to keep track of what column is what.
xlsread is good for reading excel files
Copy and paste the data into a variable in your workspace. Do save blahblah.mat so you can easily load the data later.
I personally wouldn't bother with financial time series objects. It's just going to complicate your life if you're new to MATLAB. If you loaded the data using tableread (i.e. option 1) you can then execute something like:
aapl_indicator = strcmp(d.Ticker, 'AAPL');
to get a vector indicating whether a row in your table is AAPL or not. Then:
close_price_aapl = d.Close(aapl_indicator);
will give you a vector of Apple's closing prices.
When you get down to doing math, you want to be using the matrices.