calculate standard deviation of daily data within a year - performance

Question

I have a question,
In Matlab, I have a vector of 20 years of daily data (X) and a vector of the relevant dates (DATES). In order to find the mean value of the daily data per year, I use the following script:
A = fints(DATES,X); %convert to financial time series
B = toannual(A,'CalcMethod', 'SimpAvg'); %calculate average value per year
C = fts2mat(B); %Convert fts object to vector
C is a vector of 20 values. showing the average value of the daily data for each of the 20 years. So far, so good.. Now I am trying to do the same thing but instead of calculating mean values annually, i need to calculate std annually but it seems there is not such an option with function "toannual".
Any ideas on how to do this?
THANK YOU IN ADVANCE

Answer 1

I'm assuming that X is the financial information and it is an even distribution across each year. You'll have to modify this if that isn't the case. Just to clarify, by even distribution, I mean that if there are 20 years and X has 200 values, each year has 10 values to it.
You should be able to do something like this:
num_years = length(C);
span_size = length(X)/num_years;
for n = 0:num_years-1
std_dev(n+1,1) = std(X(1+(n*span_size):(n+1)*span_size));
end
The idea is that you simply pass the date for the given year (the day to day values) into matlab's standard deviation function. That will return the std-dev for that year. std_dev should be a column vector that correlates 1:1 with your C vector of yearly averages.
unique_Dates = unique(DATES) %This should return a vector of 20 elements since you have 20 years.
std_dev = zeros(size(unique_Dates)); %Just pre allocating the standard deviation vector.
for n = 1:length(unique_Dates)
std_dev(n) = std(X(DATES==unique_Dates(n)));
end
Now this is assuming that your DATES matrix is passable to the unique function and that it will return the expected list of dates. If you have the dates in a numeric form I know this will work, I'm just concerned about the dates being in a string form.
In the event they are in a string form you can look at using regexp to parse the information and replace matching dates with a numeric identifier and use the above code. Or you can take the basic theory behind this and adapt it to what works best for you!