An Introduction to Stock Market Data Analysis with R (Part 1)

Around September of 2016 I wrote two articles on using Python for accessing, visualizing, and evaluating trading strategies (see part 1 and part 2). These have been my most popular posts, up until I published my article on learning programming languages (featuring my dad’s story as a programmer), and has been translated into both Russian (which used to be on backtest.ru at a link that now appears to no longer work) and Chinese (here and here). R has excellent packages for analyzing stock data, so I feel there should be a “translation” of the post for using R for stock data analysis.

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On Programming Languages; Why My Dad Went From Programming to Driving a Bus

In Data Science from Scratch, a book introducing data science using Python, Joel Grus said the following about R (pg. 302):

Although you can totally get away with not learning R, a lot of data scientists and data science projects use it, so it’s worth getting familiar with it.

In part, this is so that you can understand people’s R-based blog posts and examples and code; in part, this is to help you better appreciate the (comparatively) clean elegance of Python; and in part, this is to help you be a more informed participant in the never-ending “R versus Python” flamewars.