Calculating returns from a dataframe with financial data

Question

I have a dataframe with monthly financial data:

In [89]: vfiax_monthly.head()
Out[89]: 
            year  month  day       d   open  close   high    low  volume          


        

Answer 1

The easiest way to do this is to use the DataFrame.pct_change() method.

Here is a quick example

In[1]: aapl = get_data_yahoo('aapl', start='11/1/2012', end='11/13/2012')

In[2]: appl
Out[2]: 
          Open    High     Low   Close    Volume  Adj Close
Date                                                           
2012-11-01  598.22  603.00  594.17  596.54  12903500     593.83
2012-11-02  595.89  596.95  574.75  576.80  21406200     574.18
2012-11-05  583.52  587.77  577.60  584.62  18897700     581.96
2012-11-06  590.23  590.74  580.09  582.85  13389900     580.20
2012-11-07  573.84  574.54  555.75  558.00  28344600     558.00
2012-11-08  560.63  562.23  535.29  537.75  37719500     537.75
2012-11-09  540.42  554.88  533.72  547.06  33211200     547.06
2012-11-12  554.15  554.50  538.65  542.83  18421500     542.83
2012-11-13  538.91  550.48  536.36  542.90  19033900     542.90

In[3]: aapl.pct_change()
Out[3]:
                Open      High       Low     Close    Volume  Adj Close
Date                                                                   
2012-11-01       NaN       NaN       NaN       NaN       NaN        NaN
2012-11-02 -0.003895 -0.010033 -0.032684 -0.033091  0.658945  -0.033090
2012-11-05 -0.020759 -0.015378  0.004959  0.013558 -0.117186   0.013550
2012-11-06  0.011499  0.005053  0.004311 -0.003028 -0.291453  -0.003024
2012-11-07 -0.027769 -0.027423 -0.041959 -0.042635  1.116864  -0.038263
2012-11-08 -0.023020 -0.021426 -0.036815 -0.036290  0.330747  -0.036290
2012-11-09 -0.036049 -0.013073 -0.002933  0.017313 -0.119522   0.017313
2012-11-12  0.025406 -0.000685  0.009237 -0.007732 -0.445323  -0.007732
2012-11-13 -0.027502 -0.007250 -0.004251  0.000129  0.033244   0.000129