Installing quantstrat from R-forge and source

R is used extensively in the financial industry; many of my recent clients have been working in or developing products for the financial sector. Some common applications are to use R to analyze market data and evaluate quantitative trading strategies. Custom solutions are almost always the best way to do this, but the quantstrat package can make it easy to quickly get a high-level understanding of a strategy's potential.

Subscriptions Feature Added

You can now subscribe to almost any content on the ProgrammingR website, including the job listings. By subscribing, you will receive email updates when new jobs are listed or when other content types you are following are posted or updated. To subscribe to any content type(s), click on "My Account" in your user menu (on the left) and then select the "Subscriptions" tab. Choose "Content types" and select the content type(s) you would like to follow. On the "Overview" tab you may set options such as how often you are notified of new content and updates.

Bayesian Computation with R - Albert (2009)

Title: Bayesian Computation with R
Author(s): Jim Albert
Publisher/Date: Springer/2009
Statistics level: High
Programming level: Low
Overall recommendation: Recommended

Bayesian Computation with R focuses primarily on providing the reader with a basic understanding of Bayesian thinking and the relevant analytic tools included in R. It does not explore either of those areas in detail, though it does hit the key points for both.

Building Scoring and Ranking Systems in R

This guest article was written by author and consultant Tristan Yates (see his bio below). It emphasizes R's data object manipulation and scoring capabilities via a detailed financial analysis example.

Scoring and ranking systems are extremely valuable management tools. They can be used to predict the future, make decisions, and improve behavior – sometimes all of the above. Think about how the simple grade point average is used to motivate students and make admissions decisions.

R is a great tool for building scoring and ranking systems. It’s a programming language designed for analytical applications with statistical capabilities. The capability to store and manipulate data in list and table form is built right into the core language.
 

Data Manipulation with R - Spector (2008)

Title: Data Manipulation with R
Author(s): Phil Spector
Publisher/Date: Springer/2008
Statistics level: N/A
Programming level: Intermediate
Overall recommendation: Highly recommended

If there is one book that every beginning R user coming from a programming background should have, it is Spector’s Data Manipulation with R. New R users with analytic backgrounds and experience with software packages such as SAS and SPSS will do well to start with Muenchen’s R for SPSS and SAS users, especially given that a free abbreviated version is available, but those users should also make Data Manipulation with R a quick second addition to their library.

Webscraping using readLines and RCurl

There is a massive amount of data available on the web. Some of it is in the form of precompiled, downloadable datasets which are easy to access. But the majority of online data exists as web content such as blogs, news stories and cooking recipes. With precompiled files, accessing the data is fairly straightforward; just download the file, unzip if necessary, and import into R. For "wild" data however, getting the data into an analyzeable format is more difficult. Accessing online data of this sort is sometimes reffered to as "webscraping".

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