Calculating rate of return for multiple time frames (annualized, quarterly) with daily time series data (S&P 500 (SPX index) daily prices)

Question

I have a CSV file with some 30 years worth of daily close prices for the S&P 500 (SPX) stock market index, and I read it as Dataframe Series with Dates set as Index.

Dataframe:

Date	Open	High	Low	Close
2023-01-13	3960.60	4003.95	3947.67	3999.09
2023-01-12	3977.57	3997.76	3937.56	3983.17
2023-01-11	3932.35	3970.07	3928.54	3969.61
2023-01-10	3888.57	3919.83	3877.29	3919.25
2023-01-09	3910.82	3950.57	3890.42	3892.09
1990-01-08	353.79	354.24	350.54	353.79
1990-01-05	352.20	355.67	351.35	352.20
1990-01-04	355.67	358.76	352.89	355.67
1990-01-03	358.76	360.59	357.89	358.76
1990-01-02	359.69	359.69	351.98	359.69

It effectively has a date (as index) column, and four columns (open, high, low, close) of daily prices. I am using close prices.

I would like a flexible function to calculate annual returns from the chosen start date to the end date using the formula:

(end_price / beginning_price - 1) * 100

So, the annual return for 2022 would be:

(SPX_Close_price_at_31_December_2022 - SPX_Close_price_at_31_December_2021 - 1)*100

It would be ideal if the same function could handle monthly or quarterly date inputs. Then, I would like these periodic returns (%) to be added to the dataframe in a separate column, and/or a new dataframe, and match the start and end dates across rows, so I can produce consecutive annual returns on a Matplotlib line chart. And I would like to do this for the whole time series of 30 years.

This is the what I would like for the final dataframe to look like (return numbers below are examples only):

Date	Annual Return (%)
m/d/2022	-18
m/d/2021	20
m/d/2020	15
m/d/2019	18

I am a beginner with Python am and still struggling working with date and datetime formats and matching those dates to data in columns across selected rows.

Below is what I got to so far, but it doesn’t work properly. I will try the dateutil library, but I think that concepts of building out efficient functions is still something I need to work on. This is my first question on Stack Overflow, so thanks for having me 🙂

def spx_return(df, sdate, edate):

    delta = dt.timedelta(days=365)
    while (sdate <= edate):

        df2 = df['RoR'] = (df['Close'] / df['Close'].shift(-365) - 1) * 100

        sdate += delta
        #print(sdate, end="n")

    return df2

Asked By: maikoh

||

Source

Answer 1

If your df has a DatetimeIndex, then you can use the .loc accessor with the date formatted as a string to retrieve the necessary values. For example, df.loc['2022-12-31'].Close should return the Close value on 2022-12-31.

In terms of efficiency, although you could use a shift operation, there isn’t really a need to allocate more memory in a dataframe – you can use a loop instead:

annual_returns = []
end_dates = []
for year in range(1991,2022):
    end_date = f"{year}-12-31"
    start_date = f"{year-1}-12-31"
    end_dates.append(end_date)

    end_price, start_price = df.loc[end_date].Close, df.loc[start_date].Close
    annual_returns.append((end_price / start_price - 1)*100)

Then you can build your final dataframe from your lists:

df_final = pd.DataFrame(
    data=annual_returns,
    index=pd.DatetimeIndex(end_dates, name='Date'),
    columns=['Annual Return (%)']
)

Using some sample data from yfinance, I get the following:

>>> df_final
            Annual Return (%)
Date
2008-12-31         -55.508475
2009-12-31         101.521206
2010-12-31          -4.195294
2013-12-31          58.431109
2014-12-31          -5.965609
2015-12-31          44.559938
2019-12-31          29.104585
2020-12-31          31.028712
2021-12-31          65.170561

Answered By: Derek O

Answer 2

To calculate annual and quarterly rates in a generic way as well, I came up with a function that takes as arguments the start date, end date, and a pattern that distinguishes between years and quarters as the type of frequency. For the data frames extracted by start and end date, we use pd.Grouper() to extract the target data rows. For the result of that extraction, we will incorporate your formula in the next line. Also, when determining the rate from the start date, we need to go back further in time, so we subtract ‘366 days’ or ’90 days’ for the frequency keyword. I have not verified that this value leads to the correct result in all cases. This is due to market holidays such as the year-end and New Year holidays. Setting a larger number of days may solve this problem.

import pandas as pd
import yfinance as yf

df = yf.download("^GSPC", start="2016-01-01", end="2022-01-01")
df.index = pd.to_datetime(df.index)
df.index = df.index.tz_localize(None)

def rating(data, startdate, enddate, freq):
    offset = '366 days' if freq == 'Y' else '90 days'
    #dff = df.loc[(df.index >= startdate) & (df.index <= enddate)]
    dff = df.loc[(df.index >= pd.Timestamp(startdate) - pd.Timedelta(offset)) & (df.index <= pd.Timestamp(enddate))]
    dfy = dff.groupby(pd.Grouper(level='Date', freq=freq)).tail(1)
    ratio = (dfy['Close'] / dfy['Close'].shift()-1)*100
    return ratio
    
period_rating = rating(df, '2017-01-01', '2019-12-31', freq='Y')
print(period_rating)

Date
2016-12-30          NaN
2017-12-29    19.419966
2018-12-31    -6.237260
2019-12-31    28.878070
Name: Close, dtype: float64

period_rating = rating(df, '2017-01-01', '2019-12-31', freq='Q')
print(period_rating)

Date
2016-12-30          NaN
2017-03-31     5.533689
2017-06-30     2.568647
2017-09-29     3.959305
2017-12-29     6.122586
2018-03-29    -1.224561
2018-06-29     2.934639
2018-09-28     7.195851
2018-12-31   -13.971609
2019-03-29    13.066190
2019-06-28     3.787754
2019-09-30     1.189083
2019-12-31     8.534170
Name: Close, dtype: float64

Answered By: r-beginners

Calculating rate of return for multiple time frames (annualized, quarterly) with daily time series data (S&P 500 (SPX index) daily prices)

Question:

Answers: