Indicator mechanics

Financial Trading in R

Ilya Kipnis

Professional Quantitative Analyst and R programmer

Five steps to calling indicators

Write the add.indicator() function
Supply the strategy name (ex. strategy.st)
Name the function for calculating the indicator (ex. “SMA”)
Supply the inputs for the function as a list
Provide a label to your indicator (ex. “SMA200”)

Using add.indicator()

# Call add.indicator() with strategy, name, arguments, and label 
add.indicator(strategy = strategy.st, name = "SMA", 
              arguments = list(x = quote(Cl(mktdata)), 
              n = 200), label = "SMA200"))

Another way to think about indicators

Applying an indicator is similar to using the apply() command in R
You pass in the name of a function along with arguments
The key difference is the addition of a label for your indicators

Let's practice!

Financial Trading in R