Introduction to R for Finance

Learn essential data structures such as lists and data frames and apply that knowledge directly to financial examples.

In this finance-oriented introduction to R, you will learn essential data structures such as lists and data frames and have the chance to apply that knowledge to real-world financial examples. By the end of the course, you will be comfortable with the basics of manipulating your data to perform financial analysis in R.

• The Basics
• Get comfortable with the very basics of R and learn how to use it as a calculator. Also, create your first variables in R and explore some of the base data types such as numerics and characters.
• Vectors and Matrices
• In this chapter, you will learn all about vectors and matrices using historical stock prices for companies like Apple and IBM. You will then be able to feel confident creating, naming, manipulating, and selecting from vectors and matrices.
• Data Frames
• Arguably the most important data structure in R, the data frame is what most of your data will take the form of. It combines the structure of a matrix with the flexibility of having different types of data in each column.
• Factors
• Questions with answers that fall into a limited number of categories can be classified as factors. In this chapter, you will use bond credit ratings to learn all about creating, ordering, and subsetting factors.
• Lists
• Wouldn't it be nice if there was a way to hold related vectors, matrices, or data frames together in R? In this final chapter, you will explore lists and many of their interesting features by building a small portfolio of stocks.