For a client meeting, I struggled with how best to illustrate world markets since June 2008. I used R to produce this (I amended this post to reflect a prettier forked version as discussed in the comments), but I’m still not completely satisfied. Anyone have suggestions to improve?
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| From TimelyPortfolio |
What I thought was interesting was US equity outperformance and the US 10y yield move through the financial collapse low 2.15% seen in December 2008 and significantly lower than the 2.87% at the S&P low March 2009. I think both can be explained by an illusion of control assigned to the US. This illusion begins to unravel if the political process fails and monetary policy has reached its limits.
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| #I very much appreciate Joshua Ulrich's (http://blog.fosstrading.com) forked version | |
| #which offers a much nicer top section of the final graph | |
| #forked version resides here https://gist.github.com/1443358 | |
| require(quantmod) | |
| #get index tickers without the ^ which we will add in the getSymbols | |
| tckrs=c("GSPC","TNX","DJUBS","W3DOW","W5DOW") | |
| #name the indexes | |
| names(tckrs) <- c("S&P 500","US 10y Yld","DJ Commodity","Developed","Developing") | |
| #use paste to add the ^ to the index tickers | |
| getSymbols(paste("^",tckrs,sep=""), from="1986-01-01", to=Sys.Date()) | |
| #start with 1st; just avoids an if statement in the for loop | |
| #not sure what is best coding practice | |
| indexes <- to.monthly(get(tckrs[1]))[,4] | |
| for (i in 2:length(tckrs)) { | |
| #merge into one big nice xts | |
| indexes <- merge(indexes,to.monthly(get(tckrs[i]))[,4]) | |
| } | |
| colnames(indexes) <- names(tckrs) | |
| indexes <- na.omit(indexes) | |
| index(indexes) <- as.Date(index(indexes)) | |
| #set start date to 2008-06 but feel free to use any date you like | |
| indexes.roc <- indexes["2008-06::"]/lag(indexes["2008-06::"],k=1)-1 | |
| indexes.roc[1,] <- 0 | |
| indexes.cumul <- as.xts(apply(1+indexes.roc[,1:5],MARGIN=2,cumprod)) | |
| #stuff we re-use | |
| labs=colnames(indexes.cumul) | |
| colors=c("antiquewhite3","grey70","darkolivegreen4","indianred4","cadetblue4") | |
| barInd=c(1,4,5,3,2) | |
| #make plot | |
| layout(matrix(1:2, 2),heights=c(8,5)) | |
| par(mar=c(2,4,4,7),oma=c(2,1,2,0)) | |
| plot.zoo(indexes.cumul-1,col=colors,lwd=c(3,3,2,2,2),screens=1,xlab=NA,ylab="% Change",las=1) | |
| #this is the primary change Joshua Ulrich made | |
| #to allow a much nicer labelling of points on a right vertical margin | |
| axis(4, coredata(last(indexes.cumul))-1,labels=FALSE) | |
| mtext(labs, 4, at=coredata(last(indexes.cumul))-1,las=1,col=colors,line=1) | |
| title(main="World Equity, Bond, and Commodity Indexes since June 2008",cex.main=1.25) | |
| par(mar=c(4,4,2,3)) | |
| barplot(last(indexes.cumul)[,barInd]-1,las=1,beside=TRUE,col=colors[barInd], | |
| names.arg=labs[barInd], ylab="% Change",ylim=c(-0.5,0),cex.names=0.75) |
