Preface to the first edtion

R is widely used in statistical computation. It is well-suited to do computationally heavy financial analysis. In particular, evaluating performance of trading rule based on technical indicators.

Moreover, R can be one-stop solution to the whole procedure of data analysis. A standard procedure of financial data analysis is:

  1. Download/Import Data
  2. Cleaning the data
  3. Analysis
    • charting/graphical
    • statistical
    • financial Analysis
  4. Presenting result

You can do all of them inside R without using other software.

This short book is a short introduction on how to use R and RStudio to do financial data analysis from the beginning. No prior knowledge of R is required. While you will learn various skills to work on R programming but the main goal is to learn how to use R to backtest a trading strategy and evaluate its performance.

Since it is an introductory textbook, programming techniques are mainly through examples and not through detailed descriptions. Working through exercises in the book will help you master the skills.

Chiu Yu Ko

2018