Why does STD return NaN for financial time series with missing values (NaNs)?

STD returns NaN when operating on financial time series containing NaN values. This happens when I execute the code below:

dates = {'jan-01-2001'; 'jan-02-2001'; 'jan-03-2001'; ...

           'jan-04-2001'; 'jan-06-2001'};

data = [1; NaN; 1; NaN; 1];

t1 = fints(dates, data);

std(t1)

This behavior is also observed when I use MEAN on the same object.

Answer 1

[MathWorks Support Team]

This enhancement has been incorporated in Financial Toolbox 3.4 (R2008a). For previous product releases, read below for any possible workarounds:

The ability to treat NaN as missing values is not available using STD for financial time series using Financial Toolbox 3.2 (R2007a). As a workaround, you can extract the data to a matrix and compute the standard deviation using NANSTD in the Statistics Toolbox.