A Datacamp Project solution to Professor William Sharpe's reward-to-variability ratio
- Meet Professor William Sharpe 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.
The Sharpe ratio has been one of the most popular risk/return measures in finance, not least because it's so simple to use. It also helped that Professor Sharpe won a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1990 for his work on the capital asset pricing model (CAPM).
The Sharpe ratio is usually calculated for a portfolio and uses the risk-free interest rate as benchmark. We will simplify our example and use stocks instead of a portfolio. We will also use a stock index as benchmark rather than the risk-free interest rate because both are readily available at daily frequencies and we do not have to get into converting interest rates from annual to daily frequency. Just keep in mind that you would run the same calculation with portfolio returns and your risk-free rate of choice, e.g, the 3-month Treasury Bill Rate.
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.