Use R or mysql to calculate time period returns? - mysql

Question

I'm trying to calculate various time period returns (monthly, quarterly, yearly etc.) for each unique member (identified by Code in the example below) of a data set. The data set will contain monthly pricing information for a 20 year period for approximately 500 stocks. An example of the data is below:
Date Code Price Dividend
1 2005-01-31 xyz 1000.00 20.0
2 2005-01-31 abc 1.00 0.1
3 2005-02-28 xyz 1030.00 20.0
4 2005-02-28 abc 1.01 0.1
5 2005-03-31 xyz 1071.20 20.0
6 2005-03-31 abc 1.03 0.1
7 2005-04-30 xyz 1124.76 20.0
I am fairly new to R, but thought that there would be a more efficient solution than looping through each Code and then each Date as shown here:
uniqueDates <- unique(data$Date)
uniqueCodes <- unique(data$Code
for (date in uniqueDates) {
for (code in uniqueCodes) {
nextDate <- seq.Date(from=stock_data$Date[i], by="3 months",length.out=2)[2]
curPrice <- data$Price[data$Date == date]
futPrice <- data$Price[data$Date == nextDate]
data$ret[(data$Date == date) & (data$Code == code)] <- (futPrice/curPrice)-1
}
}
This method in itself has an issue in that seq.Date does not always return the final day in the month.
Unfortunately the data is not uniform (the number of companies/codes varies over time) so using a simple row offset won't work. The calculation must match the Code and Date with the desired date offset.
I had initially tried selecting the future dates by using the seq.Date function
data$ret = (data[(data$Date == (seq.Date(from = data$Date, by="3 month", length.out=2)[2])), "Price"] / data$Price) - 1
But this generated an error as seq.Date requires a single entry.
> Error in seq.Date(from = stock_data$Date, by = "3 month", length.out =
> 2) : 'from' must be of length 1
I thought that R would be well suited to this type of calculation but perhaps not. Since all the data is in a mysql database I am now thinking that it might be faster/easier to do this calc directly in the database.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Load data:
tc='
Date Code Price Dividend
2005-01-31 xyz 1000.00 20.0
2005-01-31 abc 1.00 0.1
2005-02-28 xyz 1030.00 20.0
2005-02-28 abc 1.01 0.1
2005-03-31 xyz 1071.20 20.0
2005-03-31 abc 1.03 0.1
2005-04-30 xyz 1124.76 20.0'
df = read.table(text=tc,header=T)
df$Date=as.Date(df$Date,"%Y-%m-%d")
First I would organize the data by date:
library(plyr)
pp1=reshape(df,timevar='Code',idvar='Date',direction='wide')
Then you would like to obtain monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc returns.
For that there are several options, one could be:
Make the data zoo or xts class. i.e
library(xts)
pp1[2:ncol(pp1)] = as.xts(pp1[2:ncol(pp1)],order.by=pp1$Date)
#let's create a function for calculating returns.
rets<-function(x,lag=1){
return(diff(log(x),lag))
}
Since this database is monthly, the lags for the returns will be:
monthly=1, quaterly=3, yearly =12. for instance let's calculate monthly return
for xyz.
lagged=1 #for monthly
This calculates Monthly returns for xyz
pp1$returns_xyz= c(NA,rets(pp1$Price.xyz,lagged))
To get all the returns:
#create matrix of returns
pricelist= ls(pp1)[grep('Price',ls(pp1))]
returnsmatrix = data.frame(matrix(rep(0,(nrow(pp1)-1)*length(pricelist)),ncol=length(pricelist)))
j=1
for(i in pricelist){
n = which(names(pp1) == i)
returnsmatrix[,j] = rets(pp1[,n],1)
j=j+1
}
#column names
codename= gsub("Price.", "", pricelist, fixed = TRUE)
names(returnsmatrix)=paste('ret',codename,sep='.')
returnsmatrix

Answer 2

You can do this very easily with the quantmod and xts packages. Using the data in AndresT's answer:
library(quantmod) # loads xts too
pp1 <- reshape(df,timevar='Code',idvar='Date',direction='wide')
# create an xts object
x <- xts(pp1[,-1], pp1[,1])
# only get the "Price.*" columns
p <- getPrice(x)
# run the periodReturn function on each column
r <- apply(p, 2, periodReturn, period="monthly", type="log")
# merge prior result into a multi-column object
r <- do.call(merge, r)
# rename columns
names(r) <- paste("monthly.return",
sapply(strsplit(names(p),"\\."), "[", 2), sep=".")
Which leaves you with an r xts object containing:
monthly.return.xyz monthly.return.abc
2005-01-31 0.00000000 0.000000000
2005-02-28 0.02955880 0.009950331
2005-03-31 0.03922071 0.019608471
2005-04-30 0.04879016 NA