Welcome to the course!

Importing and Managing Financial Data in R

Joshua Ulrich

Quantitative Analyst & quantmod Co-Author and Maintainer

About me

Author and/or maintainer of several packages
- TTR, xts, quantmod, blotter, quantstrat
R/Finance Conference Organizing Committee
St. Louis R User Group

What is getSymbols()?

Provides access to multiple data sources
Returns xts object by default
Can import data two ways:
- Return data like an ordinary function
- Create an object like load() does in base R

getSymbols(Symbols = "AAPL", src = "yahoo")

"AAPL"

getSymbols("AAPL")

"AAPL"

head(AAPL)

           AAPL.Open AAPL.High AAPL.Low AAPL.Close AAPL.Volume AAPL.Adjusted
2007-01-03     86.29     86.58    81.90      83.80   309579900      10.85709
2007-01-04     84.05     85.95    83.82      85.66   211815100      11.09807
2007-01-05     85.77     86.20    84.40      85.05   208685400      11.01904
2007-01-08     85.96     86.53    85.28      85.47   199276700      11.07345
2007-01-09     86.45     92.98    85.15      92.57   837324600      11.99333
2007-01-10     94.75     97.80    93.45      97.00   738220000      12.56728

getSymbols() data sources


Yahoo! Finance
Google Finance
FRED
Oanda
CSV

Other getSymbols() data sources

Yahoo! Finance Japan
MySQL
SQLite
RData
rds (created by saveRDS())

getSymbols() example

# Load data like load()
getSymbols("AAPL", auto.assign = TRUE)

"AAPL"

head(AAPL, n = 3)

           AAPL.Open AAPL.High AAPL.Low AAPL.Close AAPL.Volume AAPL.Adjusted
2007-01-03     86.29     86.58    81.90      83.80   309579900      10.85709
2007-01-04     84.05     85.95    83.82      85.66   211815100      11.09807
2007-01-05     85.77     86.20    84.40      85.05   208685400      11.01904

getSymbols() example

# Return data like a normal function
aapl <- getSymbols("AAPL", auto.assign = FALSE)
head(aapl, n = 3)

           AAPL.Open AAPL.High AAPL.Low AAPL.Close AAPL.Volume AAPL.Adjusted
2007-01-03     86.29     86.58    81.90      83.80   309579900      10.85709
2007-01-04     84.05     85.95    83.82      85.66   211815100      11.09807
2007-01-05     85.77     86.20    84.40      85.05   208685400      11.01904

Let's practice!

Importing and Managing Financial Data in R