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Interaction with Alpha Vantage?

13 messages · Dirk Eddelbuettel, Joshua Ulrich, Sal Abbasi +4 more

#
The quantmod package added support for queries to Alpha Vantage in the 
summer.  According to their website www.alphavantage.co:  "Composed of a 
tight-knit community of researchers, engineers, and business 
professionals, Alpha Vantage Inc. is a leading provider of free APIs for 
realtime and historical data on stocks, physical currencies, and 
digital/crypto currencies."

Has anyone had any interaction with Alpha Vantage other than the one 
comment on the quantmod github site 
https://github.com/joshuaulrich/quantmod/issues/176 on Aug 17? They 
offer support by email on their web site. I wrote them a while ago, but 
haven't had a reply.

My question was about support for the TSX. By trial and error, requests 
like TSX:POT will get intraday quotes for regular stocks. I haven't 
found how to get current quotes for ETFs or REITs.

Duncan Murdoch
#
Credit where credit is due---the 'tidyquant' folks first mentioned it, but it
in the fullest and most glorious tradition of the tibbliesverse require half
a dozen or more other packages for not apparent reason.  So I followed up
with a quick tweet on Sep 5 about a one-liner not needing anything else
besides data.table:

  https://twitter.com/eddelbuettel/status/905066349294219264

and cooked up a helper function in a so-far-unreleased package of personal
functions (this one is below) which I shared with at least Josh.  The larger
function added to quantmod is AFAIK contributed by Paul.

Now, as for interchaning with them: Nope. I too need ETFs, Canadian stocks
and whatnot for the little personal finance app I have had as a daily cronjob
since the 1990s (and been meaning to rewrite in R since then too as it is,
gasp, Perl -- see eg https://github.com/eddelbuettel/beancounter and other
online resources). It may now be time to rewrite this as the underlying
(Perl) data grabber Finance::YahooQuote is now dead due to Yahoo! walking
away from that API.  I have an unpublished R-based drop-in replacement for
just the data gathering ...

Anyway, alphavantage looks good.  We should test it some more.

Dirk



##' Fetch a real-time market data series from AlphaVantage
##'
##' Several optional parameters could be set, but are not currently.
##' @title Retrieve real-time data from AlphaVantage
##' @param sym Character string value for the ticker
##' @param datatype Character string value for the supported type of data, currently one of
##' \dQuote{intraday}, \dQuote{daily}, \dQuote{adjdaily}, \dQuote{weekly}, \dQuote{monthly}.
##' @param outputsize Character string value, one of \dQuote{compact} or \dQuote{full}. Applies
##' only daily or intraday data.
##' @return A data.table object
##' @author Dirk Eddelbuettel
alphavantage <- function(sym,
                         datatype=c("intraday", "daily", "adjdaily", "weekly", "monthly"),
                         outputsize=c("compact", "full")) {
    datatype <- match.arg(datatype)
    outputsize <- match.arg(outputsize)
    datatypeArg <- switch(datatype,
                          intraday = "TIME_SERIES_INTRADAY",
                          daily    = "TIME_SERIES_DAILY",
                          adjdaily = "TIME_SERIES_DAILY_ADJUSTED",
                          weekly   = "TIME_SERIES_WEEKLY",
                          monthly  = "TIME_SERIES_MONTHLY")

    cmd <- paste0("https://www.alphavantage.co/query?",
                  "function=", datatypeArg, "&",
                  "symbol=", sym, "&",
                  "interval=1min&",
                  "apikey=", getOption("alphavantageKey", "demo"), "&",
                  "datatype=csv&")
    if (datatype %in% c("intraday", "daily", "adjdaily")) {
        cmd <- paste0(cmd, "outputsize=", outputsize)
    }
    #print(cmd)
    data <- data.table::fread(cmd, showProgress=FALSE)
}
#
On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 9:41 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd at debian.org> wrote:
FWIW, I'm not sure when 'tidyquant' folks first mentioned it, but Paul
wrote his first implementation in early July--it just didn't make it
into quantmod until months later.  The first commit of the
'alphavantager' package was in early September.

  
    
#
And my implementation. Not finished, but works well for me...

Daniel
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#
On 06/11/2017 10:41 AM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
I'm not so sure.  I haven't noticed any problems in their data (though I 
haven't done extensive testing), but in my opinion it is a bad sign if 
there's no way to contact them.

Duncan
#
I?ve been using them for EOD prices for several months for US and European equities.  In a few cases, I?ve noticed some EOD prices for T-1, T-2 that change on T.  Apart from this, I have not found a better alternative that is free and also adjusted for dividends and splits.

Best,

Sal
#
On 6 November 2017 at 13:37, Duncan Murdoch wrote:
| I'm not so sure.  I haven't noticed any problems in their data (though I 
| haven't done extensive testing), but in my opinion it is a bad sign if 
| there's no way to contact them.

Let's call this "Duncan's Law" but let's also remember that it didn't stop
Google / Alphabet from becoming a 700 billion dollar market cap company.

Dirk
#
On 06/11/2017 1:54 PM, Dirk Eddelbuettel wrote:
But I know how to contact Google and get a response.

Duncan
#
2017-11-06 19:37 GMT+01:00 Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>:
e.g. 2004-11-01
Low
2004-10-28 95.80
2004-10-29 97.43
2004-11-01  9.12
2004-11-02 98.50
2004-11-03 98.68
#
2017-11-06 20:20 GMT+01:00 Daniel Cegie?ka <daniel.cegielka at gmail.com>:
btw. data from Alpha Vantage (not from Google).
#
On 06/11/2017 2:20 PM, Daniel Cegie?ka wrote:
Did you try reporting that to Alpha Vantage?  That's the kind of thing 
they did respond to on Aug 17 (see 
https://github.com/joshuaulrich/quantmod/issues/176).

Now that I read those messages more closely, it does appear they were in 
touch with anozari sometime in July.  So perhaps it's just me they don't 
respond to.  I was asking how to do things (and suggesting documentation 
and metadata additions), I wasn't reporting on data errors.

Duncan Murdoch
#
To be fair, as long as we're not being spammed and the data works, (and
it's free), ... and relatively accurate, I think we're okay.  (May or may
not be speaking from experience).

I can visualize a scenario where a few busy people are putting this
together.

On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 3:34 PM Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>
wrote:

  
    
2 days later
#
Early in the development of the AlphaVantage code for quantmod, I contacted support at alphavantage.co with a bug report. They replied quickly and fixed the problem.

Later, I found another problem, which I reported, too. On one hand, they never replied to that e-mail. On the other hand, the problem disappeared. It left me with the impression that someone was monitoring that address but without time to spare.

I do occasionally get HTTP 503 errors (Service Unavailable) when I run my downloader late at night. Have not noticed problems beyond that since they fixed the first two. 
Paul Teetor, Elgin, IL  USA
http://quantdevel.com/public
On Monday, November 6, 2017 4:17 PM, Erol Biceroglu <erol.biceroglu at alumni.utoronto.ca> wrote:
To be fair, as long as we're not being spammed and the data works, (and
it's free), ... and relatively accurate, I think we're okay.  (May or may
not be speaking from experience).

I can visualize a scenario where a few busy people are putting this
together.

On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 3:34 PM Duncan Murdoch <murdoch.duncan at gmail.com>
wrote: