Loading Historical Stock Data

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Historical Stock Data is critical for testing your investment strategies. There are many ways to load Historical Stock Data in to your R session. Below I show 4 different approaches to load historical stock data:

• Download Historical Stock quotes from Yahoo Fiance with getSymbols function from quantmod package
• Load Historical Stock data from the csv files you saved from Yahoo Fiance
• Load Historical Stock data from your custom files
• Load Historical Stock from one csv file, where each column represents one stock

In the code below I demonstrate these 4 methods and use loaded data to run a back-test:

###############################################################################
# Load Systematic Investor Toolbox (SIT)
###############################################################################
con = gzcon(url('http://www.systematicportfolio.com/sit.gz', 'rb'))
    source(con)
close(con)

    #*****************************************************************
    # Load historical data
    #****************************************************************** 
    load.packages('quantmod')
        
    stock.folder = 'c:\\Stocks\\Data\\'
    tickers = spl('UUP,EMB,HYG')
    
    data <- new.env()

        
    # load historical data, select data load method
    data.load.method = 'basic'
    
    if(data.load.method == 'basic') {       
        # quantmod - getSymbols
        getSymbols(tickers, src = 'yahoo', from = '1970-01-01', env = data, auto.assign = T)
    }else if(data.load.method == 'basic.local') {
        # if you saved yahoo historical price files localy
        getSymbols.sit(tickers, src = 'yahoo', from = '1980-01-01', env = data, auto.assign = T, stock.folder = stock.folder)
    }else if(data.load.method == 'custom.local') {
        # custom format historical price files
        for(n in tickers) {
            data[[n]] = read.xts(paste(stock.folder, n, '.csv', sep=''), format='%m/%d/%Y')
        }   
    }else if(data.load.method == 'custom.one.file') {
        # read from one csv file, column headers are tickers
        filename = 'hex.csv'
        all.data = read.xts(paste(stock.folder, filename, sep=''), format='%m/%d/%Y')
        for(n in names(all.data)) {
            data[[n]] = all.data[,n]
            colnames(data[[n]]) = 'Close'
            data[[n]]$Adjusted = data[[n]]$Open = data[[n]]$High = data[[n]]$Low = data[[n]]$Close
        }
    }       
        
    
    # prepare data for back test
        for(i in ls(data)) data[[i]] = adjustOHLC(data[[i]], use.Adjusted=T)                            
    bt.prep(data, align='remove.na')
 
   
    #*****************************************************************
    # Code Strategies
    #******************************************************************
    prices = data$prices  
    n = ncol(prices)
   
    models = list()
   
    # find period ends
    period.ends = endpoints(prices, 'months')
        period.ends = period.ends[period.ends > 0]
       
    obj = portfolio.allocation.helper(data$prices, period.ends=period.ends, lookback.len = 250, 
        min.risk.fns = list(EW=equal.weight.portfolio,
                        RP=risk.parity.portfolio,
                        MV=min.var.portfolio,
                        MC=min.corr.portfolio)
    ) 
    
    models = create.strategies(obj, data)$models
                    
    #*****************************************************************
    # Create Report
    #******************************************************************    
    
    strategy.performance.snapshoot(models, T)