Financial Trading in R Data Camp

Overview

Context

This Financial Trading in R course offered by Data Camp will teach you how to set up a quantstrat strategy, apply transformations of market data called indicators, create signals based on the interactions of those indicators, and even simulate orders. It will explain how to analyze your results both from statistical and visual perspectives.

What you will do during this course:

• you will learn the definition of trading, the philosophies of trading, and the pitfalls that exist in trading. This chapter covers both momentum and oscillation trading, along with some phrases to identify these types of philosophies. You will learn about overfitting and how to avoid it, obtaining and plotting financial data, and using a well-known indicator in trading.
• Before building a strategy, the quantstrat package requires you to initialize some settings. You will learn how this is done. You will cover a series of functions that deal with initializing a time zone, currency, the instruments you'll be working with, along with quantstrat's various frameworks that will allow it to perform analytics. Once this is done, you will have the knowledge to set up a quantstrat initialization file, and know how to change it.
• Indicators are crucial for your trading strategy. They are transformations of market data that allow a clearer understanding of its overall behavior, usually in exchange for lagging the market behavior. Here, you will be working with both trend types of indicators as well as oscillation indicators. You will also learn how to use pre-programmed indicators available in other libraries as well as implement one of your own.
• When constructing a quantstrat strategy, you want to see how the market interacts with indicators and how indicators interact with each other. You'll learn how indicators can generate signals in quantstrat. Signals are interactions of market data with indicators, or indicators with other indicators. There are four types of signals in quantstrat: sigComparison, sigCrossover, sigThreshold, and sigFormula. By the end of this chapter, you'll know all about these signals, what they do, and how to use them.