Datastream – Price variables: P, P#S, P#T
The default datatype (variable) for equities in Thomson Reuters Datastream is adjusted price (P).
You have to be careful when using adjusted price (P) with dead equities as Datastream will continue to give the last price for dates where the equity has been delisted and is no longer being traded. The time series is padded with the last known value.
Datastream offers additional datatypes that do not perform this padding:
- P – price adjusted – padded when there is no trading
- P#S – price adjusted unpadded – always displays NA rather than padding with latest value
- P#T – price adjusted unpadded – displays NA rather than padding after the series/equity goes dead but still pads for non-trading days
Example of differences between P, P#S and P#T
Datastream demo P, P#T, P#S (click to expand)
The Datastream spreadsheet above shows the padding for non-trading days over Easter 2010 (London Stock Exchange closed Fri 6th and Mon 9th April) and for the dead equity Autonomy Corp, which was taken over by Hewlet Packard in November 2011.
Select Datastream tag below for related posts or Datastream for related FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
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On Yahoo Finance non-trading days are just omitted – http://screencast.com/t/VNBCimz6xw
Does RI#S provide analogous results for total return indices?
A very good question. There is certainly no RI#S in the Datastream key datatypes like P#S and P#T so I suspect RI#S will just give a “data unavailable” error. I will check this out more thoroughly.