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How to use Backtrader plots in Python Notebooks

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The recent crypto bull market got me interested in chartist approaches to trading strategies. I’ve always wanted to use Deepnote‘s notebook solution, so I decided to combine my newfound hobby of algorithmic trading with my new tool craving. I started using Backtrader in Deepnote, but that produced some plotting issues.

Basically, when you use the plot method on a Cerebro object in a Notebook, some unexpected things will present themselves.

If you use plot, without or without the iplot argument set to True, you’ll run into this error:

'NoneType' object has no attribute '_send_event'

Furthermore, IPython will render the Javascript object simply as the following text lines.

<IPython.core.display.Javascript object>
[[<Figure size 432x288 with 10 Axes>]]

What you can do to produce an interpretable visualization in your notebook is the following:

%matplotlib inline
cerebro = bt.Cerebro()
cerebro.broker.setcash(10000.0)

cerebro.addstrategy(YourStrategy)
cerebro.adddata(bt.feeds.PandasData(dataname = df))
cerebro.run()

plt.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = [15, 12]
plt.rcParams.update({'font.size': 12}) 
cerebro.plot(iplot = False)

This should produce something readable, yet not interactive, like this (cropped).

Great success!

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