Categories
Books Finance

Financial Amnesia

The FT has a nice article on financial amnesia, which talks about the desire of the CFA UK discipline to incorporate some financial history into their curriculum, ostensibly to implant enough of a sense of deja vu in budding financial managers when they encounter potential disaster scenarios that they may avoid repeating them.

I think this is a great idea – the only problem is that it probably wont have any sort of meaningful impact other than provide some fascinating course material for CFA students. The problem with an industry that makes its living from markets that essentially operate on two gears – fear and greed – is that despite all of the prior knowledge in the world, we will willingly impose a state of amnesia upon ourselves if we can convince ourselves that what is happening now is in some way different, or just different enough from whatever disasters happened before. The Internet bubble, tulip-mania, and the various property boom and busts that we have seen over the last decade share at their core a common set of characteristics, but they are different (or “new”) enough that we were able to live in a state of denial. The “fear and greed” mentality also means that even if you know you are operating in a bubble that will eventually burst, you carry on regardless, as you plan to be out of the game before it all goes bad (The Greater Fool theory).

Incidentally, if you want to read a beautifully written and entertaining account of financial bubbles by one of the greatest writers on this topic, you should read this book (“A Short History of Financial Euphoria” by J.K. Galbraith). It packs a huge amount of wit and insight into its relatively small page count.

NOTE: Galbraith also wrote the definitive account on the Great Crash of 1929, which rapidly became required reading around three years ago…it’s also excellent. Galbraith has a beautiful turn of phrase.

Categories
Coding Finance R

R/Reuters Real-Time Data Extension

Last week, I posted an R extension DLL that downloads historical data from Reuters using the SFC API. This time around, I am posting an extension DLL that can subscribe to real-time updates using the RFA API. This extension allows you to specify a list of items and data fields, and subscribe for a specified amount of time to updates on those items.

Here is an example:

# Load the DLL
dyn.load("RfaClient")

# Low-level subscription function wrapper
rsub < - function(time, items, func, sessionName, config, debug) { .Call("subscribe", as.integer(time), items, func , sessionName, config, debug) } # Define items and fields to subscribe to items <- list() fields <- c("BID","ASK","TIMCOR") items[[1]] <- c("IDN_SELECTFEED", "GBP=", fields) items[[2]] <- c("IDN_SELECTFEED", "JPY=", fields) # Callback function (invoked when data items update) callback <- function(df) { print(paste("Received an update for",df$ITEM, ", update time=", df$TIMCOR)) } # Subscribe for 5 seconds using the supplied config parameters rsub(5000, items, callback, "clientSession", "rfa.cfg", FALSE)

A short introductory guide is supplied:

Introduction (PDF)
Introduction (PDF)

The functionality is pretty basic right now, and there may be issues with the code (e.g. memory leaks, performance issues). Any feedback is gratefully received.

The package, including source, can be downloaded here:

rfaclient.zip

It was built with R 2.8.0 and RFA C++ 6.0.2, using Visual C++ 2005.

Categories
Coding Finance R

R/Reuters Time Series Data Extension

This is an upload of the historical data retrieval component of the R/Reuters interface that I presented at the R user conference in August 2008 (see the presentation here).

The extension is a C++ DLL that uses the Reuters SFC API to retrieve limited time series data from the TS1 time series service. It is compiled under Visual Studio 2005 and Windows XP, but could be cross-compiled to Linux without too much difficulty.

The DLL comes with a .R file that contains commands to load the DLL, and set up some necessary initialization. If you are familiar with Reuters infrastructure and APIs, the following points are important:

  • This extension has been built with support for SSL infrastructure only;
  • You will need to provide appropriate parameters to the init() function (see the documentation for details).

The extension, plus the associated source and documentation can be downloaded here:

reuters_ts1.zip

The package makes retrieving time series data for analysis easy: I have provided a single entrypoint for retrieving data, called fetch(). This will return a data frame with a Date column and one or more data columns, depending on the data being requested.

Some examples follow:

First, an example that fetches historical daily price data for Microsoft stock and creates a price/volume chart (the historical data returned contains OHLC price data and volume data):

msft.vol < - fetch("MSFT.O",sd="1/1/2008",ed="10/31/2008") layout(matrix(c(1,1,1,1,2,2), 3, 2, T)) plot(msft.vol$Date, msft.vol$CLS, main="MSFT Close Price", type="l", ylab="", xlab="Date") plot(msft.vol$Date, msft.vol$VOL, main="Volume", type='h', ylab="", xlab="")

MSFT Chart
MSFT Chart

The next example retrieves historical price data for the highest and lowest-rated ABX subprime indices – sometimes called the barometers of the subprime crisis:

abx.aaa < - fetch("ABXAA38FGB=MP", sd="1/1/2007", ed="12/1/2008", t="d") abx.bbb <- fetch("ABXBM38FGB=MP", sd="1/1/2007", ed="12/1/2008", t="d") op <- par(mfcol=c(2,1),las=2) plot(...)

ABX AAA and BBB- Indices
ABX AAA and BBB- Indices

Finally, an example that shows the yield spreads between AAA and BBB-rated benchmark corporate bonds, and a 10-year US treasury bond:

library(zoo)
aaa10y < - fetch("AAAUSD10Y=", n=600, t="d") bbb10y <- fetch("BBBUSD10Y=", n=600, t="d") ust10y <- fetch("US10YT=RR", n=600, t="d") aaa10y.series <- zoo(aaa10y, order.by=aaa10y$Date) bbb10y.series <- zoo(bbb10y, order.by=bbb10y$Date) ust10y.series < - zoo(ust10y, order.by=ust10y$Date) full.series <- merge(aaa10y.series, bbb10y.series, ust10y.series, all=FALSE) ...

Yield Spreads
Yield Spreads

There are many more examples, plus documentation of the required R functions and their usage, in the manual:

Introductory Manual
Introductory Manual

UPDATE: The above package was built in Visual C++ 2005 using debug mode. I have attached another package below that was built in release mode. This package also includes the msvcrt redistributable DLLs, in case you get linker issues when R is loading the extension (as it was built using the MSVCRT 8.0 runtime).

reuters_ts_release1.zip

NB: This extension also depends on the Reuters SFC DLLs – specifically it loads ssl45w3280.dll and sipc3280.dll. These are available in the Reuters SSL C++ SDK version 4.5.5 (the latest version at the time of writing). I cannot legally redistribute these DLLs, so I would suggest that you download them from the Reuters development support site. Once downloaded, these DLLs should be in your system PATH (or in the same directory as the extension), so they can be loaded on demand.

DISCLAIMER: This software is not developed by Thomson Reuters and Thomson Reuters are in no way responsible for support or malfunction of this software.