[R] get.hist.quote - is great, but am I missing something?

[Ajay Shah]

I find it's just great to be able to say:

  library(tseries)
  x <- get.hist.quote(instrument="ongc.ns")

and it gets a full time-series of the stock price of the symbol
ongc.ns from Yahoo quote.

However, once my hopes have been raised by such beauty :-) I get
disappointed when I do

> plot(x)

and the annotation is horrible! The x axis is not labelled as
dates. The default plot method for get.hist.quote should be better,
no?

I was not able to understand the object returned by get.hist.quote. If
I say:

> summary(x)
      Open             High             Low            Close      
 Min.   : 397.0   Min.   : 407.3   Min.   :395.1   Min.   :398.4  
 1st Qu.: 494.2   1st Qu.: 501.4   1st Qu.:482.7   1st Qu.:490.4  
 Median : 614.9   Median : 622.7   Median :600.7   Median :610.0  
 Mean   : 615.6   Mean   : 627.1   Mean   :599.7   Mean   :611.9  
 3rd Qu.: 690.5   3rd Qu.: 707.4   3rd Qu.:676.2   3rd Qu.:691.5  
 Max.   :1000.0   Max.   :1000.0   Max.   :930.0   Max.   :944.9  
 NA's   :  88.0   NA's   :  88.0   NA's   : 88.0   NA's   : 88.0  

there is no mention of a 'time' variable. And, I'm unable to extract
(say) a vector of closing prices - e.g. if I say:

> closingprices <- x$Close
> print(closingprices)
NULL

I guess I'm not understanding the object that get.hist.quote makes. In
general, what are R facilities for discovering what a given object is?

-- 
Ajay Shah                                                   Consultant
ajayshah at mayin.org                      Department of Economic Affairs
http://www.mayin.org/ajayshah           Ministry of Finance, New Delhi