Exercises: Variance

By Christopher van Hoecke, Maxwell Margenot, and Delaney Mackenzie

https://www.quantopian.com/lectures/variance

IMPORTANT NOTE:

This lecture corresponds to the Variance lecture, which is part of the Quantopian lecture series. This homework expects you to rely heavily on the code presented in the corresponding lecture. Please copy and paste regularly from that lecture when starting to work on the problems, as trying to do them from scratch will likely be too difficult.

Part of the Quantopian Lecture Series:


In [1]:
# Useful Libraries
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

Data:

In [2]:
X = np.random.randint(100, size = 100)

Exercise 1:

Using the skills aquired in the lecture series, find the following parameters of the list X above:

  • Range
  • Mean Absolute Deviation
  • Variance and Standard Deviation
  • Semivariance and Semideviation
  • Target variance (with B = 60)
In [3]:
# Range of X
range_X = np.ptp(X)

## Your code goes here
print 'Range of X: %s' %(range_X)
Range of X: 99
In [5]:
# Mean Absolute Deviation
# First calculate the value of mu (the mean)

mu = np.mean(X)

## Your code goes here
abs_dispersion = [np.abs(mu - x) for x in X]
MAD = np.sum(abs_dispersion)/len(abs_dispersion)
print 'Mean absolute deviation of X:', MAD
 Mean absolute deviation of X: 25.37
In [6]:
# Variance and standard deviation

## Your code goes here

print 'Variance of X:', np.var(X)
print 'Standard deviation of X:', np.std(X)
Variance of X: 857.9451
Standard deviation of X: 29.2906998892
In [7]:
# Semivariance and semideviation

## Your code goes here

lows = [e for e in X if e <= mu]

semivar = np.sum( (lows - mu) ** 2 ) / len(lows)

print 'Semivariance of X:', semivar
print 'Semideviation of X:', np.sqrt(semivar)
Semivariance of X: 831.0133
Semideviation of X: 28.8273012958
In [11]:
# Target variance

## Your code goes here

B = 60
lows_B = [e for e in X if e <= B]
semivar_B = sum(map(lambda x: (x - B)**2,lows_B))/len(lows_B)

print 'Target semivariance of X:', semivar_B
print 'Target semideviation of X:', np.sqrt(semivar_B)
Target semivariance of X: 1308
Target semideviation of X: 36.1662826401

Exercise 2:

Using the skills aquired in the lecture series, find the following parameters of prices for AT&T stock over a year:

  • 30 days rolling variance
  • 15 days rolling Standard Deviation
In [13]:
att = get_pricing('T', fields='open_price', start_date='2016-01-01', end_date='2017-01-01')
In [14]:
# Rolling mean

variance = att.rolling(window = 30).var()
In [15]:
# Rolling standard deviation

std = att.rolling(window = 15).std()

Exercise 3 :

The portfolio variance is calculated as

$$\text{VAR}_p = \text{VAR}_{s1} (w_1^2) + \text{VAR}_{s2}(w_2^2) + \text{COV}_{S_1, S_2} (2 w_1 w_2)$$

Where $w_1$ and $w_2$ are the weights of $S_1$ and $S_2$.

Find values of $w_1$ and $w_2$ to have a portfolio variance of 50.

In [16]:
asset1 = get_pricing('AAPL', fields='open_price', start_date='2016-01-01', end_date='2017-01-01')
asset2 = get_pricing('XLF', fields='open_price', start_date='2016-01-01', end_date='2017-01-01')

cov = np.cov(asset1, asset2)[0,1]

w1 = 0.87
w2 = 1 - w1

v1 = np.var(asset1)
v2 = np.var(asset2)

pvariance = (w1**2)*v1+(w2**2)*v2+(2*w1*w2)*cov

print 'Portfolio variance: ', pvariance
Portfolio variance:  50.1862438743

Congratulations on completing the Variance exercises!

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