quantmod Package

With the help of chartSeries() function we can take advantage of the fact that we have OHLC data. Before we can use the function we have to load (or first install) the quantmod package.

> library(quantmod)

> chartSeries(bmw)

Trying to use the chartseries() function with the BMW time series downloaded as data.frame from Chapter 1 we get the following error.

Error in try.xts(x, error = "chartSeries requires an xtsible object") : 
  chartSeries requires an xtsible object

This error message shows us that we need on object of class xts or at least an object that can be converted to have class xts. Remember that we have the possibility to tell Quandl() to return the data in the desired format.

> bmw_2014_xts <- Quandl("GOOG/FRA_BMW",
+                        start_date = "2014-01-01", end_date = "2014-12-31",
+                        order = "asc", type = "xts")
> class(bmw_2014_xts)

[1] "xts" "zoo"

Now we are ready to produce OHLC plots with chartSeries() using the default settings.

> chartSeries(bmw_2014_xts)

The function call above produces a candlestick plot for our OHLC data.

We can change the title of the plot and turn the background from black to white and switch from candlestick chart to bar chart.

> chartSeries(bmw_2014_xts, name = "BMW OHLC Bar Chart",
+             type = "bars",
+             theme = chartTheme("white"))

We can even zoom into the chart. Assume that we are interested only in the data for September 2014.

> zoomChart("2014-09::2014-09")

The current active plot is the one for September 2014 data, to choose another zoom range we have to first set the active plot back to our original data which is the year 2014 with zoomChart() without any arguments.

> zoomChart()

We can now set a new time span, for example the second half of the year.

> zoomChart("2014-07::")

For more details about the usage of chartSeries() function have a look at the help page or browse to the quantmod package's website.