Ever since I saw the very helpful distribution page first presented in Download and parse EDHEC hedge fund indexes, I have used it liberally.  Now that it is has been functionalized (Visually Comparing Return Distributions), I thought I would amend it slightly to compare distributions of returns across managers rather than time.  As a simple example, I compared the mutual funds offered by Vanguard and Pimco.  This amended function might be very helpful for internal performance monitoring of separately managed accounts across external or internal money managers.  Also, for the purposes of composite dispersion, this might be a good beginning summary look.

I like what I did in Pretty Correlation Map of PIMCO Funds, but this time I wanted to get the performance data directly in a table rather than calculating performance from multiple calls to the getSymbols function.  R can easily load these tables, but I got lazy and imported the tables into Excel https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByeeEIaS0AOsRE1OeWk2VmFFVUU/edit and then cleaned them up with some old fashioned pivot tables.  When finished data munging, I copied and pasted into a data sheet to save as .csv (could have used R again to get the data directly from Excel), so I could publish through Google Docs for anyone that wanted to replicate what I have done.

Pimco and Vanguard Mutual Funds 1 Year Performance

From TimelyPortfolio

Pimco and Vanguard Mutual Funds YTD 2013 Performance

From TimelyPortfolio

Now, I’d like to incorporate another fine piece of work Tracking Number of Historical Clusters into this analysis, but I’ll save that for another post.

Code from Gist: