How to get company description, statistics using R from eg. Yahoo Finance?

Question

I am looking for ways to get company description, key statistics, chairman name from Yahoo Finance (or other financial website) using R, for example package quantmod.

There is oodles of info how to get current and historical prices etc, but this is not what I want.

best,

Answer 1

This R package does not support queries for Asian bourses. The problem appears to be with the underlying Yahoo APIs.

Answer 2

You can get that using Intrinio's API. Their data tag directory allows you to look up the tags you want, in your case, "long_description" and "ceo" will get you the data you want:

#Install httr, which you need to request data via API
install.packages("httr")
require("httr")

#Create variables for your usename and password, get those at intrinio.com/login
username <- "Your_API_Username"
password <- "Your_API_Password"

#Making an api call for roic. This puts together the different parts of the API call

base <- "https://api.intrinio.com/"
endpoint <- "data_point"
stock <- "T"
item1 <- "long_description"
item2 <- "ceo"

#Pasting them together to make the API call
call1 <- paste(base,endpoint,"?","ticker","=", stock, "&","item","=",item1, sep="")
call2 <- paste(base,endpoint,"?","ticker","=", stock, "&","item","=",item2, sep="")


#Now we use the API call to request the data from Intrinio's database

ATT_description <- GET(call1, authenticate(username,password, type = "basic"))
ATT_CEO <- GET(call2, authenticate(username,password, type = "basic"))

#That gives us the ROIC value, but it isn't in a good format so we parse it

test1 <- unlist(content(ATT_description,"parsed"))
test2 <- unlist(content(ATT_CEO,"parsed"))

#Then make your data frame:

df1 <- data.frame(test1)

df2 <- data.frame(test2)

#From here you can rbind or cbind, and create loops to get the same data for many tickers

You can get your API keys here. Full API documentation here. This is what the CEO dataframe looks like: