Tracking stock movements using the quantmod package

An affordable and time-saving way to download and store stock prices can be considered a prerequisite for every future analysis on financial portfolio data.

The quantmod package offers R users a really convenient way to perform this task. Complete documentation for the package is available at http://www.quantmod.com.

Quantmod, through the getSymbols() function, lets you establish a direct connection with financial data sources such as:

• Yahoo Finance

• Google Finance

• www.oanda.com

• Federal Reserve economic data

This recipe will leverage the getSymbols() function to download Apple's stock quotations. A proper candle and bar chart will then be produced.

Getting ready

As you would expect, we first need to install and load the package:

install.packages("quantmod")
library('quantmod')

How to do it...

1. Download data from Yahoo Finance:

   getSymbols("AAPL")
   

2. Plot your data on candlechart:

   candleChart(AAPL, subset = 'last 1 year')
   

   Let's take a look at the following...