An interesting application in the statistical programming language R is to be able to download data from Yahoo Finance and then analyse these data with all the analytical power of R.
A frequent task for an analyst is to compare several companies’ stock-performance versus a benchmark. Whoever has done that knows that data need to be normalised to a baseline. Most often, the stock-value of a single day is chosen as baseline. And here’s the pitfall: you reference a trend to the variability of a single day.
This app overcomes the problem by a) allowing the user to define as baseline a timeframe and thus to reduce the variation in the baseline data and b) to choose among multiple benchmarks.
Before taking action, the user can now test the stability of his or her conclusions with regards to the choices of baseline and benchmark.
