We just released more new features in StataNow. When you update your copy of StataNow, you will have access to the following:

Financial statistics. A new suite of commands is available for analysis of financial data. Now you can easily compute returns from prices. Or determine optimal allocation of assets in your portfolio by minimizing variance or maximizing the return-to-risk ratio. Estimate value at risk (VaR) before making important financial decisions. Fit a capital asset pricing model (CAPM), and explore how asset returns relate to the market. Or use a Fama–MacBeth regression to estimate the price of risk. The financial statistics suite comprises the following commands:

These new commands complement many existing data management and time-series commands that are useful for analysis of financial data. You can learn more about analyzing financial data in Stata in the new Financial Statistics Reference Manual.

Convert PDF to plain text. Perhaps you need to extract content that can be easily parsed for data mining or efficient processing by large language models. Or you may need the content from your PDF in a smaller file size that can quickly be loaded and processed. With the new pdf2txt command, you can easily convert your PDF to plain text format.

Download business calendars. With the new bcal webcopy command, you can download a business calendar for a common stock exchange such as the S&P 500, NASDAQ, or NYSE. These calendars are customized for recent years and are useful for teaching and analyzing modern data that are collected only on the trading days of the selected exchange. They are also easily extended to accommodate any date range corresponding to your own data.

We’ve also recently added new features that are available to everyone with Stata 19 and StataNow 19.

Do-file Editor monitoring. On Windows and Unix, when a file on disk is open in the Do-file Editor, the Do-file Editor will now prompt you if the contents of the file have been changed outside the Do-file Editor. You can choose to reload the file, ignore the changes, or request that changed files are automatically loaded in the future.

Subpopulation design degrees of freedom. When you have complex survey data and are performing subpopulation estimation, you can now restrict the design degrees-of-freedom calculation to use only within-subpopulation primary sampling units by using the new dofsubpop option of svyset or the svy prefix. Similarly, use the dofsubpop option of mean, proportion, ratio, and total to restrict the degrees-of-freedom calculation to use only observations within each subpopulation.

Offset bars in bar charts. Whether you are creating a bar plot with twoway bar or a range plot with twoway rbar, you can now specify the baroffset() option to offset the center of the bar.

For more features of StataNow 19 and Stata 19, see https://www.stata.com/new-in-stata/features/.

You can type update all in your copy of StataNow or Stata 19 to get access to these version-specific updates.