Downloading S&P 500 Stock Data from Google/Quandl with R (Command Line Script)

DISCLAIMER: Any losses incurred based on the content of this post are the responsibility of the trader, not me. I, the author, neither take responsibility for the conduct of others nor offer any guarantees. None of this should be considered as financial advice; the content of this article is only for educational/entertainment purposes.

While most Americans have heard of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), most people active in finance consider the S&P 500 stock index to be the better barometer of the overall American stock market. The 500 stocks included in the index are large-cap stocks seen as a leading indicator for the performance of stocks overall. Thus the S&P 500 and its component stocks are sometimes treated as “the market.”

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.