How to simplify quantmod commands to load stock data - r

Question

If I want to load stock data, this is how I do it (for Google as an example):
## most recent close price
getSymbols("GOOG")
last(GOOG)[,4]
## total equity
getFinancials("GOOG")
viewFinancials(GOOG.f, type='BS', period='A',subset = NULL)['Total Equity',1]
## Net Income
viewFinancials(GOOG.f, type='IS', period='Q',subset = NULL)['Net Income',1]
...the list goes on.
But it would be much more practical to have to type GOOG only once and then have it replaced with a generic name in the rest of the code. How can this be done in quantmod?

Answer 1

The option auto.assign=FALSE should solve the problem.
Below is a modified version of your code. Extending it to a larger number of tickers and treating them, e.g., in a loop should be straightforward.
library(quantmod)
CollectionOfTickers <- c("GOOG")
IndexOfCurrentTicker <- 1
# the part that follows could be extracted as a function
CurrentTicker <- getSymbols(CollectionOfTickers[IndexOfCurrentTicker], auto.assign=FALSE)
Cl(last(CurrentTicker)) ## most recent close price
## total equity
CurrentTickerFinancials <- getFinancials(CollectionOfTickers[IndexOfCurrentTicker], auto.assign=FALSE)
viewFinancials(CurrentTickerFinancials, type='BS', period='A',subset = NULL)['Total Equity',1]
## Net Income
viewFinancials(CurrentTickerFinancials, type='IS', period='Q',subset = NULL)['Net Income',1]
Note that "GOOG" is no longer hard-coded. It is defined only once, in the vector CollectionOfTickers and the entry of this vector is retrieved by using the variable IndexOfCurrentTicker which could represent a looping variable in a larger collection of tickers.
Edit
A variant of this code to perform a loop over several tickers could be programmed like this:
library(quantmod)
CollectionOfTickers <- c("GOOG","AAPL","TSLA","MSFT")
for (TickerName in CollectionOfTickers) {
CurrentTicker <- getSymbols(TickerName, auto.assign=FALSE)
cat("========\nData for ticker ", TickerName,"\n")
## most recent close price:
print(Cl(last(CurrentTicker)))
CurrentTickerFinancials <- getFinancials(TickerName, auto.assign=FALSE)
## total equity:
print(viewFinancials(CurrentTickerFinancials, type='BS', period='A',subset = NULL)['Total Equity',1])
## Net Income:
print(viewFinancials(CurrentTickerFinancials, type='IS', period='Q',subset = NULL)['Net Income',1])
cat("========\n")
}
The code quality could be improved by some further refactoring, but in any case this should work.
Hope this helps.

Answer 2

I think this is what you want. If you need something else...post back...
require(XML)
require(plyr)
getKeyStats_xpath <- function(symbol) {
yahoo.URL <- "http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s="
html_text <- htmlParse(paste(yahoo.URL, symbol, sep = ""), encoding="UTF-8")
#search for <td> nodes anywhere that have class 'yfnc_tablehead1'
nodes <- getNodeSet(html_text, "/*//td[#class='yfnc_tablehead1']")
if(length(nodes) > 0 ) {
measures <- sapply(nodes, xmlValue)
#Clean up the column name
measures <- gsub(" *[0-9]*:", "", gsub(" \\(.*?\\)[0-9]*:","", measures))
#Remove dups
dups <- which(duplicated(measures))
#print(dups)
for(i in 1:length(dups))
measures[dups[i]] = paste(measures[dups[i]], i, sep=" ")
#use siblings function to get value
values <- sapply(nodes, function(x) xmlValue(getSibling(x)))
df <- data.frame(t(values))
colnames(df) <- measures
return(df)
} else {
# break
cat("Could not find",symbol,"\n")
return(data.frame(NA))
}
}
tickers <- c("AXP","BA","CAT","CSCO","CVX","DD","DIS","GE","GS","HD","IBM","INTC","JNJ","JPM","KO","MCD","MMM","MRK","MSFT","NKE","PFE","PG","T","TRV","UNH","UTX","V","VZ","WMT","XOM")
stats <- ldply(tickers, getKeyStats_xpath)
stats <- stats[!rowSums(is.na(stats)) == length(stats),]
rownames(stats) <- tickers
write.csv(t(stats), "FinancialStats_updated.csv",row.names=TRUE)