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Portfolio Probing

The ultimate aim of the Portfolio Probing blog is to help make fund management more effective, to make savings safer through better tools and better methods. Patrick Burns, the founder of Burns Statistics, offers a unique mix of experience in quantitative finance, statistics, computing and writing.

US market portrait 2014 week 13

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo The S&P 500 stocks are used (as implied by S&P on 2014 January 11) that still survive with the same symbol The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R — you are free to use these functions however … Continue reading

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US market portrait 2014 week 12

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo The S&P 500 stocks are used (as implied by S&P on 2014 January 11) that still survive with the same symbol The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R — you are free to use these functions however … Continue reading

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BurStFin R package version 1.02 released

More efficiency and an additional function in the new version on CRAN. Variance estimation The major functionality in the package is variance estimation: Ledoit-Wolf shrinkage via var.shrink.eqcor statistical factor model (principal components) via factor.model.stat There have been a number of previous blog posts on both factor models and Ledoit-Wolf shrinkage. Positive-definiteness The default value of … Continue reading

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US market portrait 2014 week 11

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo The S&P 500 stocks are used (as implied by S&P on 2014 January 11) that still survive with the same symbol The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R — you are free to use these functions however … Continue reading

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US market portrait 2014 week 10

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo The S&P 500 stocks are used (as implied by S&P on 2014 January 11) that still survive with the same symbol The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R — you are free to use these functions however … Continue reading

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US market portrait 2014 week 9

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo The S&P 500 stocks are used (as implied by S&P on 2014 January 11) that still survive with the same symbol The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R — you are free to use these functions however … Continue reading

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US market portrait 2014 week 8

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo The S&P 500 stocks are used (as implied by S&P on 2014 January 11) that still survive with the same symbol The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R — you are free to use these functions however … Continue reading

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US market portrait 2014 week 7

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo The S&P 500 stocks are used (as implied by S&P on 2014 January 11) that still survive with the same symbol The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R — you are free to use these functions however … Continue reading

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A complicated answer to a simple correlation question

A data analysis surprise party. Simple question If I have correlation matrices each estimated with a month of daily returns, how much worse is the average of six of those compared to the estimate with six months of daily data? Expected answer Do a statistical bootstrap with the returns and compare the standard deviations across … Continue reading

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US market portrait 2014 week 6

US large cap market returns. Fine print The data are from Yahoo The S&P 500 stocks are used (as implied by S&P on 2014 January 11) that still survive with the same symbol The initial post was “Replacing market indices” The R code is in marketportrait_funs.R — you are free to use these functions however … Continue reading

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