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Andrew Dinh edited this page 2019-04-26 07:46:24 -07:00

Table of Contents

• fund-indicators
• General notes
• Program steps
• Choosing a benchmark
• Methods
• Time Frame
• Indicators
• Persistence time frame
• Remove indicator outliers
• Contributing

fund-indicators

Welcome to the fund-indicators wiki! This project looks at relationships between various factors of mutual funds and their performance.

General notes

The program will take a very long while to send requests for each ticker. However, I was able to successfully implement caching of HTTP results, so future runs should take much less time.

Tickers and important messages are color-coded and underlined, respectively, while HTTP requests are grayed out.

• Cyan: Tickers
• Green: Important messages
• Yellow: When a stock is removed
• Underlined: Steps in the program
• Red: Error messages. Only occurs when the program has to exit

Program steps

Choosing a benchmark

Choose a benchmark from one of four choices. The S&P 500 is the most widely used benchmark; Next is the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Data for these benchmarks usually don't go beyond 10 years, so use a time frame lower than this when you're choosing it later. Accepts both numbers (1-4), names (S&P500), and tickers (SPY).

Methods

1. Read from a file
   • Choose a file that has tickers in it
   • Separates them by comma (csv), semicolon, or new lines ('\n) using RegEx
2. Enter manually
3. Other options
   • Will scrape data from various online lists of the "best" mutual funds

The program will make a file called source_name-stocks.txt with each ticker. This is helpful later, as the program is very verbose and you likely will not be able to see the ticker values that were there originally.

Time Frame

I found that in general, most sources have data within the past 5 years. Go over 60 months at your own peril.

Indicators

Once again, this accepts both numbers and the name of the choice. For any choice you make, the program will attempt to gather the data automatically, currently from Yahoo Finance. However, keep in mind that scraping a website is not always the most reliable way to gather information.

Persistence time frame

This only appears if you choose persistence for the indicator, and it must be lower than the initial time frame. The program calculates the difference in performance between the this time frame and the total time frame.

Remove indicator outliers

Before calculating relationships between indicators and performance, choosing yes here will remove mutual funds with indicator values considered outliers using the most common method for doing so.

Contributing

If you would like to contribute, file an issue, or anything else related to this program, please refer to CONTRIBUTING.md. Please not that there is also a CODE OF CONDUCT