(This article was first published on Systematic Investor » R, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers)
I recently looked at the strategy that invests in the components of S&P/TSX 60 index, and discovered that there are some abnormal jumps/drops in historical data that I could not explain. To help me spot these points and remove them, I created a helper function data.clean() function in data.r at github. Following is an example of how you can use data.clean() function:
It is surprising that Bank of Nova Scotia (BNS.TO) has only one year worth of historical data. I also did not find an explanations for jumps in the ARX, COS, ERF during 2000.
Next, I did same analysis for the stocks in the S&P 100 index:
I first thought that September 29th, 2000 drop in AAPL was an data error; however, I found following news item: Apple bruises tech sector, September 29, 2000: 4:33 p.m. ET Computer maker’s warning weighs on hardware, chip stocks; Nasdaq tumbles.
So working with data requires a bit of data manipulation and a bit of detective works. Please, always have a look at the data before running any back-tests or making any conclusions.
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