Hi, I´m a rookie in using Stata and I am stuck at this point. I have an issue using the sum function. I have a data set of 1156 observations and I have encoded my data from string variables to numeric (long) variables. When opening the data editor I therefore now have the first variables in a kolonne with string values (colored yellow) and another new kolonne of generated numeric values (colored blue). As of earlier experience the data should be colored white (?).

The numeric variable I now have called "nbitprice" is encoded by using the following command: -encode bitprice, gen(nbitprice)- because they were recognized as strings

The problem is when I am running the -sum- command on nbitprice I am not getting the mean of the values in the observations which have a range from 3,000 to 19,000 in value. Instead I get the mean or median of the number of observations, meaning I get 577,1427 when having 1156 observations. What I want is the mean of the values for each observations over time. I hope I am explaining myself good enough.

When I list the observations there are values for each observation.

As reading of some earlier posts you would probably like som info:

. describe nbitprice

storage display value
variable name type format label variable label
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
nbitprice long %9.0g nbitprice
Bitprice

. count
1,156

. summarize nbitprice, detail

Bitprice
-------------------------------------------------------------
Percentiles Smallest
1% 12 1
5% 58 2
10% 116 3 Obs 1,156
25% 288.5 4 Sum of Wgt. 1,156

50% 577.5 Mean 577.1427
Largest Std. Dev. 332.9293
75% 865.5 1150
90% 1038 1151 Variance 110841.9
95% 1096 1152 Skewness -.0003597
99% 1142 1153 Kurtosis 1.79956


Can someone explain what I need to do to get the summarized results I need? I would like to get the mean of the actual value of the 1156 different observations, the standard deviation, min and max value.

Thank you for your help in advance.