{talib} is a new
R package built on TA-Lib, which is now
available on CRAN. The R-package is targeted at individuals
and, perhaps, institutions who, in some form or the other, interacts
with the financial markets using technical analysis.
The library is built with minimal dependencies for long-term
stability and freedom in mind. All functions are built around
data.frame– and matrix-classes which are
portable to all other data-containers with minimal effort.
Everything in the library is built ‘bottom-up’ for maximum speed and
memory efficiency. Each indicator interacts directly with R’s C API via
.Call().
In this blog post I will give a brief introduction to the charting
interface which is built to mimick the behaviour of base
R’s plotting API.
A quick introduction to charts
In this section I will briefly introduce the most important aspects of the charting, ‘quality of life’-features and themes. Below is a simple starting point; charting BTC:
talib::chart(
talib::BTC
)
chart() returns a candlestick chart by default. Below
are the formals:
str(formals(talib::chart))
#> Dotted pair list of 5
#> $ x : symbol
#> $ type : chr "candlestick"
#> $ idx : NULL
#> $ title: symbol
#> $ ... : symbolModifying themes
talib::set_theme("hawks_and_doves")
talib::chart(
talib::BTC
)
Charting indicators
{
talib::chart(talib::BTC)
talib::indicator(talib::SMA, n = 7)
talib::indicator(talib::SMA, n = 14)
talib::indicator(talib::SMA, n = 21)
talib::indicator(talib::SMA, n = 28)
talib::indicator(talib::MACD)
talib::indicator(talib::trading_volume)
}
Installation
{talib} is finally on CRAN, and can be installed as
follows:
install.packages("talib")It can also be built from source with additional
CMake-flags:
install.packages(
"talib",
type = "source",
configure.args = "-O3 -march=native"
)Contributing and submitting bug-reports
{talib} is still in its early stage so contributions,
even if small, bug-reports, suggestions and critiques are gratefully
accepted.
Visit the repository here: https://github.com/serkor1/ta-lib-R.
Created on 2026-04-29 with reprex v2.1.1