Alpha Vantage has free historical financial information. All you need to do is get a free API key at < https://www.alphavantage.co>. Then you can use the R interface to retrieve free equity information. Refer to the Alpha Vantage website for more information.
Alpha Vantage is a free service that enables users to get real-time and historical financial data. New users will need to visit Alpha Vantage and obtain an API key.
The alphavantager
package provides a convenient and lightweight interface to the Alpha Vantage API.
To get started, install the package from CRAN or from GitHub:
install.packages("alphavantager")devtools::install_github("business-science/alphavantager")
Load the package.
library(alphavantager)
Set your API key (get one from Alpha Vantage if you don't already have one... it's free).
av_api_key("YOUR_API_KEY")print(av_api_key())#> [1] "YOUR_API_KEY"
Now, you're ready to get financial data via av_get()
, which accepts the same1 arguments as the API Documentation parameters. The function is setup with two primary arguments, symbol
and av_fun
, which accepts an equity and one of the API "function" parameters. You can pass additional API parameters via the ...
.
# Function is streamlined and user adds additional parameters via ...args(av_get)#> function (symbol = NULL, av_fun, ...)#> NULL
Here are a few examples of retrieving real-time and historical financial data!
av_get(symbol = "MSFT", av_fun = "TIME_SERIES_INTRADAY", interval = "15min")
av_get(symbol = "MSFT", av_fun = "AROON", interval = "monthly", time_period = 60)
av_get(av_fun = "SECTOR")
The av_fun
argument replaces the API parameter "function" because function is a reserved name in R. All other arguments match the Alpha Vantage API parameters.
There is no need to specify the apikey
parameter as an argument to av_get()
. The required method is to set the API key using av_api_key("YOUR_API_KEY")
.
There is no need to specify the datatype
parameter as an argument to av_get()
. The function will return a tibble data frame.
Some data sets only return 100 rows by default. Change the parameter outputsize = "full"
to get the full dataset.
Intial release of alphavantager
, a R interface to the Alpha Vantage API. Learn more at https://www.alphavantage.co.