R Package Releases

First, the bad news: Google Finance no longer provides data for historical prices or financial statements, so we say goodbye to getSymbols.google() and getFinancials.google(). (#221) They are now defunct as of quantmod 0.4-13. Now, the good news: Thanks to Steve Bronder, getSymbols() can now import data from Tiingo! (#220) This feature is part of quantmod 0.4-13, which is now on CRAN. Windows and Mac binaries should be built in a day or two.

This xts release contains mostly bugfixes, but there are a few noteworthy features. Some of these features were added in version 0.10-1, but I forgot to blog about it. Anyway, in no particular order: endpoints() gained sub-second accuracy on Windows (#202)! na.locf.xts() now honors x and xout arguments by dispatching to the next method (#215). Thanks to Morten Grum for the report. na.locf.xts() and na.omit.xts() now support character xts objects. Thanks to Ken Williams and Samo Pahor for the reports (#42).

I’m pleased to announce that the RQuantLib Windows binaries are now up to 0.4.4! The RQuantLib pre-built Windows binaries have been frozen on CRAN since 0.4.2, but now you can get version 0.4.4 binaries on Dirk’s ghrr drat repo. Installation is as simple as: drat::addRepo("ghrr") # maybe use 'install.packages("drat")' first install.packages("RQuantLib", type="binary") I will be able to create Windows binaries for future RQuantLib versions too, now that I have a Windows QuantLib build (version 1.

Thanks to Paul Teetor, getSymbols() can now import data from Alpha Vantage! This feature is part of the quantmod 0.4-11 release, and provides another another data source to avoid any Yahoo Finance API changes*. Alpha Vantage is a free web service that provides real-time and historical equity data. They provide daily, weekly, and monthly history for both domestic and international markets, with up to 20 years of history. Dividend and split adjusted close prices are available for daily data.

A new, and long overdue, release of xts is now on CRAN! The major change is the completely new plot.xts() written by Michael Weylandt and Ross Bennett, and which is based on Jeff Ryan’s quantmod::chart_Series() code. Do note that the new plot.xts() includes breaking changes to the original (and rather limited) plot.xts(). However, we believe the new functionality more than compensates for the potential one-time inconvenience. And I will no longer have to tell people that I use plot.

A new release of quantmod is now on CRAN! The only change was to address changes to Yahoo! Finance and their effects on getSymbols.yahoo(). GitHub issue #157 contains some details about the fix implementation. Unfortunately, the URL wasn’t the only thing that changed. The actual data available for download changed as well. The most noticeable difference is that the adjusted close column is no longer dividend-adjusted (i.e. it’s only split-adjusted). Also, only the close price is unadjusted; the open, high, and low are split-adjusted.

I pushed a bug-fix release of quantmod to CRAN last night. The major changes were to getSymbols.FRED() (#141) getSymbols.oanda() (#144) getSymbols.yahoo() (#149) All three providers made breaking changes to their URLs/interfaces. getSymbols.google() also got some love. It now honors all arguments set via setSymbolLookup() (#138), and it correctly parses the date column in non-English locales (#140). There’s a handy new argument to getDividends(): split.adjust. It allows you to request dividends unadjusted for splits (#128).