Financial and non financial calendars

Introduction

bizdays users usually argue me out of inconsistencies between bizdays and offset functions. These inconsistencies appear every time a non business day is used as argument of one of these funcions. This might sound strange, but this is the expected behavior for these functions. To handle that I introduced the ability to create financial and non financial calendars. This vignette shows that the pointed inconsistencies only appears when we work with financial calendars and explains what to do in such situations. It also illustrates how the business days are counted.

How bizdays counts business days?

To compute the number of business days between two dates effectively and with a good performance, bizdays creates two indexes. The two indexes are called forward and backward. These indexes associate a number to each date from the calendar’s start_date up to its end_date. In the forward index, the first business day is 1, the second is 2 and so on. The backward index starts in the end with the last business day equals 1 and goes increasing towards the begining. This works fine in financial calculations because between two consecutive business days we have 1 day, in both indexes. The non business days are gaps and they share the index with their business days neighbors, see the figure below. The blue boxes are working days and the green ones nonworking days.

bizdays index

Differently we can imagine that each business day in the sequence of dates of the calendar contributes with 1 and the non business days with 0. The forward index does an accumulated sum starting from the begining and the backward does the same starting in the end.

As we can see in the figure above, from Tuesday to Monday we have 7 days (one week), starting at 1 and ending up at 7 in the current days index. In the business days indexes the counting starts at 1 and ends up at 4 and 4 is the total number of business days shown.

To compute the number of business days between two dates bizdays uses these two indexes to handle the different situations where the arguments from and to are nonworking days.

Creating non financial calendars

Let’s create a calendar a non financial calendar with these dates to illustrate.

library(bizdays)

create.calendar(name = "example1", weekdays = c("saturday", "sunday"), start.date = "2017-01-24", end.date = "2017-01-30", holidays = "2017-01-25", financial = FALSE)

calendars()[["example1"]] # view the calendar

## example1 non financial calendar 
##   1 holidays 
##   2 weekdays (saturday, sunday) 
##   range from 2017-01-24 to 2017-01-30 
## bizdays arguments adjust
##   from: none 
##   to:   none

Calling the bizdays function to compute the business days from 2017-01-24 to 2017-01-26 results in:

bizdays("2017-01-24", "2017-01-26", "example1")

## [1] 2

2 business days that is the amount of business days in the given interval.

In another example, starting and ending up at the holiday, we get

bizdays("2017-01-24", "2017-01-25", "example1")

## [1] 1

bizdays("2017-01-25", "2017-01-26", "example1")

## [1] 1

as expected it returns 1 in both cases. And also if you offset the date 2017-01-25 by one business day, you end up in one of its neighbors.

offset("2017-01-25", c(-1, 1), "example1")

## [1] "2017-01-24" "2017-01-26"

In the situations where both, from and to, are non business days, we get:

bizdays("2017-01-25", "2017-01-28", "example1")

## [1] 2

bizdays("2017-01-25", "2017-01-29", "example1")

## [1] 2

which is also correct because we have two business days into these intervals.

Creating financial calendars

The devil is in the financial calendars. These examples give unexpected results. Let’s create a financial calendar with the same dates.

create.calendar(name = "example2", weekdays = c("saturday", "sunday"), start.date = "2017-01-24", end.date = "2017-01-30", holidays = "2017-01-25", financial = TRUE)

calendars()[["example2"]] # view the calendar

## example2 financial calendar 
##   1 holidays 
##   2 weekdays (saturday, sunday) 
##   range from 2017-01-24 to 2017-01-30 
## bizdays arguments adjust
##   from: none 
##   to:   none

All strange situations appear when non business days are passed as arguments to bizdays and offset function. In the first example above, where we count the number of business days in the interval (2017-01-25, 2017-01-26).

bizdays("2017-01-25", "2017-01-26", "example2")

## [1] 0

The result is 0 indicating that we don’t have one business day to compound an interest rate. On the other hand, if we offset the non business day 2017-01-25 by one we have

offset("2017-01-25", 1, "example2")

## [1] "2017-01-26"

which might sound non sense, given that bizdays returns 0. But, the non sense is the use of non business days as arguments while working with financial calendars. To handle this situation I suggest the functions preceding (or adjust_previous) and following (or adjust_next). These functions move the given date to the previous (or next) business date, if it is not a business day, otherwise the given date is returned. In the example above we can use preceding.

prev_date = preceding("2017-01-25", "example2")
prev_date

## [1] "2017-01-24"

bizdays(prev_date, "2017-01-26", "example2")

## [1] 1

offset(prev_date, 1, "example2")

## [1] "2017-01-26"

If you don’t want to call these functions every time you call bizdays, you can set the arguments adjust_from and adjust_to on create.calendar. These arguments have been created, to execute a date adjustment of the arguments from and to according to users needs. These arguments must be set with one of these three functions:

• adjust_none: does not execute date adjustment, this is the default value
• preceding or adjust_previous: move the date for the previous business day if it is nonworking day
• following or adjust_next: move the date for the next business day if it is nonworking day

In our third example, let’s set these arguments

create.calendar(name = "example3", weekdays = c("saturday", "sunday"), start.date = "2017-01-24", end.date = "2017-01-30", holidays = "2017-01-25", financial = TRUE, adjust.from = preceding, adjust.to = following)

calendars()[["example3"]] # view the calendar

## example3 financial calendar 
##   1 holidays 
##   2 weekdays (saturday, sunday) 
##   range from 2017-01-24 to 2017-01-30 
## bizdays arguments adjust
##   from: preceding 
##   to:   following

we have

bizdays("2017-01-25", "2017-01-26", "example3")

## [1] 1

offset("2017-01-25", 1, "example3")

## [1] "2017-01-26"

as expected.