Stock Information Through R

• For more than two decades, financial inforamtion on stock prices have been available throuth the Internet.
• Several aggregators such as Yahoo and Google have finance websites that can graph and download this information

Issues Viewing this Information

• Downloading data can be cumbersome
• Getting it in the right format is unreliable
• Loading it into an analytics application has not always lent flexibility

There is a solution

• R Packages such as quantmod make it easy to obtain this information directly into reusable code.
• Analytic packages such as TTR can use this information to present useful or insightful analytics
• ShinyApps provide a means for users to interact with the data, do what-if scenarios, and create meaningful analysis.

Lets look at the stock price for The Home Depot, a home improvement retailer based in the United States in Atlanta, Georgia.

• The code below shows the quantmod package to import the data from Yahoo for HD.
• Once the data is downloaded, it can be transformed into other structures, such as dataframes, for analysis.

dataInput<-getSymbols("HD",src="yahoo",auto.assign = FALSE)
#transform to data frame
stockData<- as.data.frame(dataInput)  

In the figure on the left, I used the hist function to create a histogram. On the right, TTR package creates a 10 period moving average forecast of the stock's closing price.

• See the Stock Viewer on ShinyApps to try other symbols and scenarios.