After writing my recent post “Scaling a Simple Earnings Strategy to the NASDAQ Exchange” I started to research how I could implement that earnings strategy into a live brokerage account directly from R. Most of us have heard of Quantopian or other backtesting services, but things can get complicated quickly once you search for a way to implement a live strategy using R. I wanted to find an easy-to-use package or brokerage account that could allow me to implement live trades using only R. From my experience, R is a great tool to use for backtesting with packages like quantstrat offering a fast and powerful backtesting platform, but fails for live trade implementation. I think this might be due to a low number of exchanges that offer real-time and easy-to-use free API connection. I almost came to the conclusion that I would need to use other languages other than R to find a easy way to implement my earnings strategy until I found an online brokerage called Alpaca, creating AlpacaforR.
