Python For Finance
Portfolio Simple Returns
In this article I will show you how to write a python program for finance. This program will show you how to compute portfolio simple returns, daily returns, volatility, variance (risk), co-variance, and stock correlation.
The idea is to create a fictional portfolio containing the 5 best performing tech stocks, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google also known as FAANG.
I will also give our portfolio some weights, so 40% of the money invested in this fictional portfolio will be in Facebook, 10% in Amazon, 30% in Apple, 10% in Netflix and 10% in Google.
If you prefer not to read this article and would like a video representation of it, you can check out the YouTube Video below. It goes through everything in this article with a little more detail, and will help make it easy for you to start developing your own program, or you can use both as supplementary materials for learning !
Start Programming:
I will start by stating what I want this program to do. Again the idea is to create a fictional portfolio containing the 5 best performing tech stocks, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google also known as FAANG and compute the portfolio simple returns, daily returns, volatility, variance (risk), co-variance, and stock correlation.
#Description: This is a python program for finance.
#This program will show you how to compute portfolio simple returns,
#daily returns, variance, co-variance, and volatility etc.Import The Libraries & Packages
Next import some of the libraries that will be used within this program. We will use the datetime library to get the date. The library pandas_datareader will be used to get the stock price. The library pandas will be used for analysis. The library numpy will be used for high level mathematical functions and matrices. The library matplotlib.pyplot will be used for graphing, and the style of the graph will be the same style used for the website fivethirtyeight.com, this is achieved by the statement plt.style.use('fivethirtyeight') .
# Import the libraries
from datetime import datetime
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import pandas_datareader as web
import matplotlib.pyplot as pltplt.style.use('fivethirtyeight')
Get The Stock Symbols
Get the stock symbols of the stock that will be in this fictional portfolio and store them in a list. Remember that this portfolio will be using Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix & Google stock also known as “FAANG”.
Facebook symbol = FB
Amazon symbol = AMZN
Apple symbol = AAPL
Netflix symbol = NFLX
Google symbol = GOOG
# Get the stock symbols in your portfolio
stockSymbols = ["FB", "AMZN", "AAPL", "NFLX", "GOOG"]Get The Start & End Dates Of The Portfolio
Now let’s get the start date and end date of the portfolio. I am choosing January 1st , 2013 to be the starting date because the Facebook stock wasn’t public until mid 2012 and I want a full year of stock data from Facebook.
#Get the stock starting date
stockStartDate = '2013-01-01'The ending date of the portfolio will be whatever the current date is, so I will get today's date and format it accordingly. Then I will print the date just to make sure that it is in the correct format ‘YYYY-mm-dd’
# Get todays date and format it in the form YYYY-MM-DD
today = datetime.today().strftime('%Y-%m-%d')print(today)
Get The Number Of Assets In The Portfolio
In this fictional portfolio the number of assets is 5, but maybe later the number of stocks within the portfolio will change and if it does I want a robust way of getting the number of assets in the portfolio. So I’ll do that now.
# Get the number of assests in the portfolio
numAssets = len(stockSymbols) # Print the number of assests in your portfolio
print('You have '+ str(numAssets)+ ' assets in your portfolio')
Get The Stock Price(s) For The Portfolio
First I will create a function to get the stock Adjusted Close price.
# Create a function to get the stock price(s) of the portfolio
def getMyPortfolio(stocks= stockSymbols, start = stockStartDate, end = today, col='Adj Close'): data = web.DataReader(stocks, data_source='yahoo', start=start, end=end)[col] return data
Next I will test the function by storing the values in a variable and showing the results.
# Get the stock portfolio Adj. Close price
my_stocks = getMyPortfolio(stockSymbols)# Show my stocks
my_stocks
Visually Show The Stock/Portfolio Price(s)
First I want to create a function to visualize the stock in the portfolio.
# Create a function to visualize the stock/portfolio
def showGraph(stocks= stockSymbols,start=stockStartDate, end=today, col='Adj Close'):
# Create the title
title = 'Portfolio ' + col + ' Price History'
#Get the stocks
my_stocks = getMyPortfolio(stocks= stocks, start=start, end=end, col = col)
# Visualize the price history
plt.figure(figsize=(12.2,4.5)) # Loop through each stock and plot the Adj Close for each day
for c in my_stocks.columns.values:
plt.plot( my_stocks[c], label=c)
plt.title(title)
plt.xlabel('Date',fontsize=18)
plt.ylabel(col +' Price USD ($)',fontsize=18)
plt.legend(my_stocks.columns.values, loc='upper left')
plt.show()
Now that I’m done creating the function, I want to test and show the results.
# Show the adjusted close price of FAANG showGraph(stockSymbols)
Analyze The Stocks/Portfolio
Time to analyze the stocks /portfolio and get some measurements. I want to first calculate and show the stock daily simple returns.
# Calculate Simple Returns
daily_simple_returns = my_stocks.pct_change(1)daily_simple_returns
Show the stock correlation. Correlation is used to determine when a change in one variable can result in a change in another. A correlation value of 1 means two stocks have a perfect positive correlation. If one stock moves up while the other goes down, they would have a perfect negative correlation, noted by a value of -1. The correlation will always have a measurement value between -1 and 1.
# Show the stock correlation
daily_simple_returns.corr()
Show the co-variance matrix for the daily simple returns. Co-variance can tell how the stocks move together.
# Show the co-variance matrix for simple returns
daily_simple_returns.cov()The diagonal entries of the co-variance matrix are the variances and the other entries are the co-variances. The co-variance of two stocks tells you how likely they are to increase or decrease simultaneously.
Show the variance. Variance (σ²) in statistics is a measurement of the spread between numbers in a data set. The higher the variance of an asset price, the higher risk the asset bears along with a higher return and a higher volatility. The lower the variance of an asset price, the lower risk the asset bears along with a lower return and a lower volatility.
# Show the variance
daily_simple_returns.var()
Get the volatility or square root of variance also known as standard deviation and print it. You can see from the picture below that Google is the least volatile and Netflix is the most volatile and therefore Google is not as risky as the rest of the stocks while Netflix is the riskiest stock in the portfolio.
# Print the standard deviation
print("The Stock Volatility:")
daily_simple_returns.std()
Now visualize the stocks daily simple returns / volatility.
# Visualize the stocks daily simple returns / volatility
plt.figure(figsize=(12,4.5)) #Set the figure size (width, height)# Loop through each stock and plot the simple returns for each day
for c in daily_simple_returns.columns.values:
plt.plot(daily_simple_returns.index, daily_simple_returns[c], lw=2, label=c)# Place the legend in the upper left corner with font size of 10
plt.legend(loc='upper right', fontsize=10)plt.title('Volatility')
plt.ylabel('Daily Simple Returns') #Label the Y-axis simple returns
plt.xlabel('Date')
plt.show()
Show the mean / average / expected daily simple return. As expected the stock that gives the highest return is Netflix and the lowest return is given by Google.
# Show the mean / average of the daily simple return
dailyMeanSimpleReturns = daily_simple_returns.mean()# Print the daily mean simple return
print("The daily mean simple return: ")
print(dailyMeanSimpleReturns)
Calculate and print the expected portfolio daily performance using random weights. Exactly 40% of the money invested in this fictional portfolio will be in Facebook, 10% in Amazon, 30% in Apple, 10% in Netflix and 10% in Google.
# Calculate the expected portfolio daily performance with weights
# 40% FB, 10% AMZN, 30% AAPL, 10% NFLX, 10% GOOG
randomWeights = np.array([0.4, 0.1, 0.3,0.1,0.1])portfolioSimpleReturn = np.sum(dailyMeanSimpleReturns*randomWeights) # Print the daily expected portfolio return
print("The daily expected portfolio return: "+str(portfolioSimpleReturn))
Get the yearly simple return. This can be calculated by taking the portfolio simple return calculation and multiplying it by 253 since there are approximately 253 trading days in a year on average for NASDAQ and NYSE.
The number 253 was calculated from 365.25 (days on average per year) * 5/7 (proportion work days per week) — 6 (weekday holidays) — 3*5/7 (fixed date holidays) = 252.75 ≈ 253.
# Print the expected annual portfolio simple return
print("Expected annualised portfolio simple return : "+ str(portfolioSimpleReturn * 253))
Calculate and show the growth of the investment over this particular period of time. This can easily be achieved by calculating the daily cumulative returns.
# Calculate the growth of our investment
dailyCumulSimplReturn = (daily_simple_returns+1).cumprod()# Show the cumulative simple return
dailyCumulSimplReturn
Visually show the daily cumulative returns.
# Visualize the daily cumulative simple returns
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(12.2,4.5))for c in dailyCumulSimplReturn.columns.values:
plt.plot(dailyCumulSimplReturn.index, dailyCumulSimplReturn[c], lw=2, label=c)# Place the legend in the upper left corner with font size of 10plt.legend(loc='upper left', fontsize=10)
plt.xlabel("Date")
plt.ylabel("Growth of $1 investment")
plt.title("Daily Cumulative Simple Returns")
plt.show()
We can see from this chart that if we had invested $1 in Netflix in Jan. 2013 , and sold it sometime between the year 2018 and 2019, we would have made 30 times our initial investment.
That’s it, we are done creating this program !
If you are also interested in reading more on Python one of the fastest growing programming languages that many companies and computer science departments use then I recommend you check out the book Learning Python written by Mark Lutz’s. Also you can see the full code in this article here.
Thanks for reading this article I hope it’s helpful to you all! If you enjoyed this article and found it helpful please leave some claps to show your appreciation. Keep up the learning, and if you like Python, machine learning, mathematics, computer science, programming or algorithm analysis, please visit and subscribe to my YouTube channels (randerson112358 & compsci112358 ).
