Downloading Yahoo stock prices in R

Question

This is a newbie question in R. I am downloading yahoo finance monthly stock price data using R where the ticker names are read from a text file. I am using a loop to read

Answer 1

This also a little late...If you want to grab data with just R's base functions without dealing with any add-on packages, just use the function read.csv(URL), where the URL is a string pointing to the right place at Yahoo. The data will be pulled in as a dataframe, and you will need to convert the 'Date' from a string to a Date type in order for any plots to look nice. Simple code snippet is below.

URL <- "http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=SPY"
dat <- read.csv(URL)
dat$Date <- as.Date(dat$Date, "%Y-%m-%d")

Using R's base functions may give you more control over the data manipulation.