Re: st: Creating quintiles with "xtile"

[Jeph Herrin <junk@spandrel.net>]

If there are no missings to account for, you can get there
like this:

 bys date (ret): gen newvar=ceil(_n*5/_N)

will do it.

hth,
Jeph


Yvonne Capstick wrote:
> Hi,
> I have a dataset of stock returns each month. For each month, I'd like 
> to sort the stocks into quintiles. What I'd really like to do is 
> something like:
>
> sort date
> by date: xtile newvar = ret, nq(5)
>
> However, Stata doesn't let me combine "xtile" with "by". I can obviously 
> get around this by looping through the dates, but this is 
> time-consuming. In many other applications, I can use "by" to save on a 
> loop (e.g. sort date, by date: egen newvar = mean(ret)) but I can't seem 
> to use it here. Does anyone know of a more efficient way to generate my 
> quintiles per month?
>
> Thanks, Yvonne
>
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