df <- structure(list(inv = c("INV_1", "INV_1", "INV_1", "INV_1", "INV_1"), ass = c("x", "x", "x", "x", "x"), datetime = c("2010-01-01",
"2010-01-02", "2010-01-03", "2010-01-08", "2010-01-19"), portfolio = c(10,
0, 5, 2, 0)), operation = c(10, -10, 5, -3, -2), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, -5L))
So I have 4000 investors with 6000 different assets, for each investor I have his trading operations in two different variables: operation tells me if he is buying/selling; portfolio tells me how much he has in the portfolio.
What I want to do is computing the number of days a position stays open in the portfolio, so I though about computing the difference between the day in which the portfolio goes back to zero and the day in which the portfolio went positive (it is not possible to get negative portfolio).
so in the dataset above I would count row2 - row1 ==> 2010-01-02 - 2010-01-01
and row 5 - row 3 ==> 2010-01-19 - 2010-01-03 and so on...
I want to do this computation for all the investor & asset I have in my dataset for all the rows in which I find that portfolio > 0.
So my dataset will have a further column called duration which would be equal, in this case to c(0,1,0,5,16) (so of course i also had to compute raw1 - raw1 and raw3 - raw3)
Hence my problem is to restart the count everytime portfolio goes back to zero.