R and Forex

As was pointed out to you before, this is really more of an
R-SIG-Finance question, but I wouldn't expect too much explanation
there either, just people pointing you to the standard R finance tools
(quantmod, zoo/xts, TTR, RBloomberg, and the Rmetrics suite; there's
also some fantastic tools in development but if you just picked up
your first book on R, you probably aren't ready for those yet).

You question isn't particularly well-defined either:

Do you just want to study currency price series in R? This is simple:
just get the data (perhaps from oanda using quantmod::getSymbols or
simply by reading in through any of the regular functions) and study
it however you like.

The actual act of trading, however, is harder to do solely within R:
there is a very popular IBrokers API but I haven't used it much. It
sounds like you are probably a lone trader so if you don't have a
pre-existing relationship with IBrokers you'll probably want to enter
trades through whichever broker you currently use. That -- the
IBrokers package -- is the complete only solution on that end I'm
aware of, though I'm sure many folks have their own work-arounds.

And as far as experiences go: well, I suppose folks wouldn't be doing
it if they thought there was no money to be made, now would they?

If you want more to read: check the CRAN task views, as suggested before.

Michael

PS -- A serious note: FX is much closer to a zero-sum game than
long-equity, I would be remiss if I didn't warn you to tread
carefully.

On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 1:50 PM, Yves S. Garret