quantmod

getSymbols Rebooted

Articles

quantmod and getSymbols() have been a core part of the R/Finance ecosystem for over 15 years. We want to change some things, but they would break existing code. We can make these changes in the new ‘rfimport’ package instead.

quantmod_0.4.22 on CRAN

R Package Releases

An updated version of quantmod is now on CRAN. It adds functions HL(), is.HL(), and has.HL() to check for ‘high’ and ’low’ price columns. It also makes accessing Yahoo Finance price, dividend, and split data more robust. getSymbols.FRED() got to and from arguments, like other getSymbols() methods. The remaining changes are bug fixes and maintenace chores.

Goodbye Google, Hello Tiingo!

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.

getSymbols and Alpha Vantage

R Package Releases
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.

Importing and managing financial data

Articles
I’m excited to announce my DataCamp course on importing and managing financial data in R! I’m also honored that it is included in DataCamp’s Quantitative Analyst with R Career Track! You can explore the first chapter for free, so be sure to check it out! Course Description Financial and economic time series data come in various shapes, sizes, and periodicities. Getting the data into R can be stressful and time-consuming, especially when you need to merge data from several different sources into one data set.

quantmod 0.4-9 on CRAN

R Package Releases
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.

quantmod 0.4-8 on CRAN

R Package Releases
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).