st: Strange behaviour of -correlate- command

[Zurab Sajaia <zsajaia@hotmail.com>]

Dear all,
 
I've encountered a problem for which I can't find an explanation so far, it seems that I'm getting wrong estimates of covariance, results differ if I use -correlate- command or do calculations manually (I tried exporting data to Excel and used COVAR() function there and it seems that Excel is on my side), 
so I was wandering whether something is indeed wrong in Stata, or I'm doing it incorrectly (perhaps it's time to stop working and go home?)...
 
So here the deal, I've uploaded an example dataset to the web (30kb):
 
.use http://www.adeptanalytics.org/download/temp/corr_bug.dta, clear
 
.corr y r, c
(obs=2419)
             |        y        r
-------------+------------------
           y |  2.8e+07
           r |  1142.05  .083368

 
 
but if I do it manually:
 
.summarize y, meanonly
.generate double y1 = y - r(mean)
 
.summarize r, meanonly
generate double r1 = r - r(mean)
 
generate double prod = y1 * r1
 
summarize prod
    Variable |       Obs        Mean    Std. Dev.       Min        Max
-------------+--------------------------------------------------------
        prod |      2419    1141.579    2152.761  -53.76514   47015.59
 
 
The same result (1141.579) I get using Excel's COVAR() function.
Do you have any ideas what can be happening here?
 
Thanks,
Zurab
  		 	   		  
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