lobsteR

lobsteR provides a tidy workflow for requesting, downloading, and reading LOBSTER high-frequency order book data directly from R. LOBSTER reconstructs full limit order books from NASDAQ historical message data and delivers them as pairs of message files and order book snapshot files. This package handles the end-to-end pipeline — authentication, request submission, archive retrieval, and file download — so you can focus on analysis. For downstream high-frequency econometrics, see the highfrequency package.

Prerequisites: an active account at lobsterdata.com is required to request and download data.

Installation

Install the released version from CRAN:

install.packages("lobsteR")

Or the development version from GitHub:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("voigtstefan/lobsteR")

Workflow

library(lobsteR)

1. Authenticate

Store your credentials in .Renviron (open it with usethis::edit_r_environ()) to avoid hardcoding them in scripts:

LOBSTER_USER=you@example.com
LOBSTER_PWD=your-password

Then authenticate:

lobster_login <- account_login(
  login = Sys.getenv("LOBSTER_USER"),
  pwd   = Sys.getenv("LOBSTER_PWD")
)

2. Build a request

request_query() expands a symbol and date range into one row per trading day, automatically removing weekends and NYSE holidays. level sets the number of order book price levels included in the snapshot files (e.g. 10 returns the top 10 bid and ask levels).

library(lobsteR)

request_query(
  symbol     = "MSFT",
  start_date = "2023-01-02",
  end_date   = "2023-01-13",
  level      = 10
)

#>    symbol start_date   end_date level
#> 2    MSFT 2023-01-03 2023-01-03    10
#> 3    MSFT 2023-01-04 2023-01-04    10
#> 4    MSFT 2023-01-05 2023-01-05    10
#> 5    MSFT 2023-01-06 2023-01-06    10
#> 8    MSFT 2023-01-09 2023-01-09    10
#> 9    MSFT 2023-01-10 2023-01-10    10
#> 10   MSFT 2023-01-11 2023-01-11    10
#> 11   MSFT 2023-01-12 2023-01-12    10
#> 12   MSFT 2023-01-13 2023-01-13    10

For large date ranges, use frequency = "1 month" to submit one request per month rather than one per day, which reduces load on the LOBSTER server.

3. Submit the request

request_submit(
  account_login = lobster_login,
  request       = data_request
)

LOBSTER processes requests server-side. Depending on the volume of messages, this can take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours. You can safely close your R session while waiting — processing continues on the LOBSTER servers.

4. Check the archive

Once processing is complete, the files appear in your account archive:

lobster_archive <- account_archive(account = lobster_login)
lobster_archive

The returned tibble has one row per available dataset with columns id, symbol, start_date, end_date, level, size, and download.

5. Download

dir.create("data-lobster", showWarnings = FALSE)

data_download(
  requested_data = dplyr::filter(lobster_archive, symbol == "MSFT"),
  account_login  = lobster_login,
  path           = "data-lobster"
)

Downloaded .7z archives are extracted automatically. Pass unzip = FALSE to keep the raw archives. Note that extraction runs in a background process, so the function returns before the files are fully written to disk — check the path directory before proceeding with analysis.

System dependencies on Linux

The archive package used for .7z extraction requires system libraries. On a Debian/Ubuntu system:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y gpgv gnupg libarchive13t64 liblz4-dev libacl1-dev libext2fs-dev nettle-dev
sudo apt-get install -y libarchive-dev