Risk and Returns: The Sharpe Ratio
- Topic: Data Manipulation, Data Visualization
- Programming language: Python
- Packages: pandas, numpy, matplotlib
- Algorithms Used: Principal Component Analysis,Logistic Regression, Decision Trees
- Project URL: Github
An investment may make sense if we expect it to return more money than it costs. But returns are only part of the story because they are risky - there may be a range of possible outcomes. How does one compare different investments that may deliver similar results on average, but exhibit different levels of risks?
Enter William Sharpe. He introduced the reward-to-variability ratio in 1966 that soon came to be called the Sharpe Ratio. It compares the expected returns for two investment opportunities and calculates the additional return per unit of risk an investor could obtain by choosing one over the other. In particular, it looks at the difference in returns for two investments and compares the average difference to the standard deviation (as a measure of risk) of this difference. A higher Sharpe ratio means that the reward will be higher for a given amount of risk. It is common to compare a specific opportunity against a benchmark that represents an entire category of investments.
So let's learn about the Sharpe ratio by calculating it for the stocks of the two tech giants Facebook and Amazon. As benchmark we'll use the S&P 500 that measures the performance of the 500 largest stocks in the US. When we use a stock index instead of the risk-free rate, the result is called the Information Ratio and is used to benchmark the return on active portfolio management because it tells you how much more return for a given unit of risk your portfolio manager earned relative to just putting your money into a low-cost index fund.
We used stocks data of the two tech giants Facebook and Amazon. As benchmark we'll use the S&P 500 that measures the performance of the 500 largest stocks in the US.
In this project, we applied the Sharpe ratio to real financial data using pandas.
In 2016, Amazon had a Sharpe ratio twice as high as Facebook. This means that an investment in Amazon returned twice as much compared to the S&P 500 for each unit of risk an investor would have assumed. In other words, in risk-adjusted terms, the investment in Amazon would have been more attractive.
This difference was mostly driven by differences in return rather than risk between Amazon and Facebook. The risk of choosing Amazon over FB (as measured by the standard deviation) was only slightly higher so that the higher Sharpe ratio for Amazon ends up higher mainly due to the higher average daily returns for Amazon.
When faced with investment alternatives that offer both different returns and risks, the Sharpe Ratio helps to make a decision by adjusting the returns by the differences in risk and allows an investor to compare investment opportunities on equal terms, that is, on an 'apples-to-apples' basis.