I wrote this a little while ago as I noticed that a lot of time is spent
computing risk statistics. This is done over the complete history over
and over again while this could be done just by using the previously
computed value (iteratively).
We didn't go forward back then because for minute trade data the
difference was not significant enough. However, now with zipline
standalone I think most people will use daily (because that's
what's available) and it makes a huge difference
(speed-up of a couple of 100%).
Unfortunately, we can't just replace the existing one with an
iterative as for the final cumulative stats the batch is still
better. So that's not as nice, but the performance increase is
big enough for me to issue this PR (zipline is actually painfully
slow with daily data).
There is a unittest that compares that both produce exactly
the same outputs.
Speed measurements (for 500 trading days, daily source):
with iterative:
real 26.617 user 12.909 sys 6.112 pcpu 71.46
prior:
real 44.176 user 31.030 sys 11.381 pcpu 96.00
Mostly whitespace, line width and other spacing changes.
Also, removes use of deprecated has_key in favor of `in`
Going forward new patches should pass running `flake8` before
submission.
Thomas Wiecki