Collecting data can be a drudge for many tasks in economics or securities analysis. Fortunately, R has some good options available to streamline this task.

Popular R Packages for Stock Data

quantmod:
The quantmod package is a favorite among financial analysts.
It provides functions for quantitative financial modeling, including the retrieval of historical stock prices from sources such as Yahoo Finance.
With quantmod, you can not only automate downloading the price history for a stock but also crank out a handful of charts in your favorite format.

tidyquant:
Another useful package is tidyquant, which unlocks an entire set of useful libraries within the tidyverse, which plays well with financial data.
These additional capabilities simplify manipulating data, running basic studies on price action and integrating other visualizations.

Example: Retrieving Stock Data

Here’s a quick example using both quantmod and tidyquant:

Using quantmod:

# Install and load quantmod if you haven't already
if (!require("quantmod")) install.packages("quantmod")
library(quantmod)

# Retrieve historical data for Microstrategy 
getSymbols("MSTR", src = "yahoo", from = "2020-01-01", to = "2025-03-01")

# Visualize the stock data using a basic chart
chartSeries(MSTR, theme = chartTheme("white"))

Using tidyquant:

# Install and load tidyquant if needed
if (!require("tidyquant")) install.packages("tidyquant")
library(tidyquant)

# Retrieve historical data for Microstrategy.
mstr_data <- tq_get("MSTR", from = "2020-01-01", to = "2025-03-01")

# Display the first few rows of the data
head(mstr_data)

These examples demonstrate the ease of accessing stock data.

In practice, which package you choose generally depends on who you work with. Quantmod is popular within the trading and financial analyst communities. Analysts with a more academic background or broader programming interests have likely been pitched on the tinyverse a few times along the way. Each works, however, and can dramatically simplify your workflow.

Conclusion

We’ve shown you two ways to get the job done. The choice is up to you!

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