Financial Toolbox

Function Output Arguments

Some functions return no arguments, some return just one, and some return multiple arguments. Functions that return multiple arguments use the syntax

• [A, B, C] = function(variables...)
  

to return arguments A, B, and C. If you omit all but one, the function returns the first argument. Thus, for this example if you use the syntax

• X = function(variables...)
  

function returns a value for A, but not for B or C.

Some functions that return vectors accept only scalars as arguments. Why could such functions not accept vectors as arguments and return matrices, where each column in the output matrix corresponds to an entry in the input vector? The answer is that the output vectors can be variable length and thus will not fit in a matrix without some convention to indicate that the shorter columns are missing data.

Functions that require asset life as an input, and return values corresponding to different periods over that life, cannot generally handle vectors or matrices as input arguments. Those functions are

amortize	Amortization
depfixdb	Fixed declining-balance depreciation
depgendb	General declining-balance depreciation
depsoyd	Sum of years' digits depreciation

For example, suppose you have a collection of assets such as automobiles and you want to compute the depreciation schedules for them. The function depfixdb computes a stream of declining-balance depreciation values for an asset. You might want to set up a vector where each entry is the initial value of each asset. depfixdb also needs the lifetime of an asset. If you were to set up such a collection of automobiles as an input vector, and the lifetimes of those automobiles varied, the resulting depreciation streams would differ in length according to the life of each automobile, and the output column lengths would vary. A matrix must have the same number of rows in each column.

Input Arguments

Interest Rate Arguments