I am trying to quantify a stock's beta (bench marked vs. SPY) in R using the PerformanceAnalytics CAPM.beta() function and the results aren't even close to the values I am seeing online at Yahoo/Google Finance. The code:
require(PerformanceAnalytics)
start_date <- "2013-08-24"
acad <- getSymbols("ACAD", from = start_date, auto.assign = F)
spy <- getSymbols("SPY", from = start_date, auto.assign = F)
CAPM.beta(acad[,6], spy[,6])
For the above example, Yahoo/Finviz/Google all list ACAD's beta at 2.6 to more than 3.0. While I am not sure what the lookback period is for each site, changing the value in the above code produces a beta value of less than 1 for 1,2,3 yr lookbacks.
Similarly, by trying to calculate the beta using lm(), I am getting ie 0.39 beta for ACAD ~ SPY 2 year lookback:
m <- lm(acad[,6] ~ spy[,6] + 0)
beta <- coef(m)[1]
beta
what am I missing?