People who build up their investments understand how difficult it is to maintain the best optimization for their portfolio. There are several tools within the R programming language that can help make this easier and allow a person to handle risk much easier. Using these tools allow people to utilize the modern portfolio theory in their management in many ways. There are many packages that can be brought in to make a program that can make more sense of the money people are making or losing. This makes portfolio risk easily seen and dealt with in a more scientific method.
Packages Used
There are quite a few packages that can be brought in for people to use the tools available for portfolio optimization. Tidyquant can be used for both the tibble function and getsymbols function, which allows people to organize stock information. Batchgetsymbol is another way to get and organize large amounts of information. Hmslc will allow for binning of data and many of the commands that will help shape what a person sees in a good format. JrvFinance will allow people to use financial equations if some of the investments are in the venture capitalism areas for some percentage.
The well named portfolio.optimization package is another one to use for this for R programs. There are the data analysis packages of fBasic, evir, and timeSeries. GeneralizedHyperbolic is another of the packages that can help to analyze all the data that can come from research. Finding the right packages can become a headache at first, but there are many available that can turn days of work into a few hours to allow the investor to know what is happening and still have more time free. An investor that also programs will understand how this research will make life easier through updates.
Starting Point
Someone who spends time making sure that they are making money or even getting ready to will need to know what is a risky asset and what is just a variance. The programmer or investor will have to sort through their investments to allow for categories for the chance to get data easier. This will take multiple specialized packages to be used to bring in functions that can sort, download, and make it all easier to be seen by the end user. Stock information should not be getting mixed up with private REIT information or venture capitalism projects.
Stock Data
In a previous blog post, we discussed how to get the information that will be needed to handle the stocks that the investor has. This requires functions like GetSymbols or BatchGetSymbols and then a way to organize the different data points that come from the downloads. Many people with a portfolio will have a certain percentage in stocks, so this will be an important category for everyone involved. Make sure to have a good picture of the stocks owned and how many of each. There is also a need to be able to change the numbers every day.
Measure Efficiency
Finding the mean variance optimization in R for a portfolio is actually easy when the programmer grabs the tseries package. This gives a person the portfolio.optim() function, which computes if the portfolio is efficient for the needs of the investor. The arguments are there to help find out what short sales will do for the investments and how it is on risk. This will take time and experimentation to get right, but this will help people know where they are with their investments much easier than many data tables. This is a measuring stick for easier math application.
Understanding Math
Getting the expected return means that the investments have the right portfolio weights to get the asset returns with the right standard deviation. Good optimization strategies means far more than the math, but also an understanding of the markets that a person is involved with. An efficient frontier of investments means that the investor understands the portfolio variance within a random portfolio. The portfolio selection for this can teach the math that can be applied in other places. People need to see how a slowdown in one area can be counteracted by another area that will take over the work.
Programming Needs
As seen in the previous paragraphs, a programmer will need to see what packages are available to give the needed command libraries. A person will need to utilize binning to pull the information from returns that are not stocks to see how money is being handled. Understanding IRR will allow someone to determine what companies will be best for the areas of risk that the investor will want to go into. It may take multiple programs to do this if a programmer is working on a large project, but a single catered one could be all that is needed for a single investor.
Coding Snippets
Looking into mean variance will most likely be the biggest headache for all involved. If a person is going for less risk, they may want to avoid shorting stocks. This can all be seen by this command function.
Portfolio.optim(x, pm = mean(x), riskless = TRUE, shorts = FALSE)
This will mean that people are needing to get information for all investments to start understanding what is being used. Stocks are not the areas people use to increase their wealth. The numeric function will give a visual representation of many areas that are not stocks.
numeric(length = 15)
as.numeric(x)
This will all take time to get the visual representation right, depending on who is using the information. Some of the tools may only be used by someone interested in stocks. Other tools will be needed for people involved in other areas. To start the process, a person will need to sit down and understand the investment areas that are to be measured. If the investor is also the programmer, this becomes easier. That is not always the case, and this means that programmers and investors will need to set goals and understand what all is being covered. An efficient portfolio will show up after all this work.