Reading and Combining Excel Time Series in Matlab- Maintaining Order -

i have following code read off time series data (contained in sheets 5 19 in excel workbook). each worksheet titled "ts" followed number of time series. process works fine apart 1 thing- when study returns find time series shifted along 5. i.e. ts 6 becomes 11th column in "returns" data , ts 19 becomes 5th column, ts 15 becomes 1st column etc. need them in same order read- such ts 1 in 1st column, ts 2 in 2nd etc. problem because read off titles of worksheets ("assetlist") maintain actual order throughout subsequent codes. therefore when recombine titles , returns find not match. complicates further manipulation when, example column 4 titled "ts 4" contains data of ts 18. there in code have wrong?

xl='timeseries.xlsx';  formatin = 'dd/mm/yyyy'; formatout = 'mmm-dd-yyyy';   bounds=3; [bounds,~] = xlsread(xl,bounds); 

% determine number of worksheets in xls-file:

firstsheet=5; [~,assetlist] = xlsfinfo(xl); lngth=size(assetlist,2); assetlist(:,1:firstsheet-1)=[]; 

% loop through number of sheets , retrieve values

merge_count = 1;   i=firstsheet:lngth        [fundvalues, ~, fundsheet] = xlsread(xl,i); 

% extract dates , data , combine % (to remove unneccessary text in rows 1 4)

fund_dates_data = fundsheet(4:end,1:2); funddates = cellstr(datestr(datevec(fund_dates_data(:,1),...                                     formatin),formatout)); funddata = cell2mat(fund_dates_data(:,2)); % create time series each fund      fundts{i}=fints(funddates,funddata,['fund',num2str(i)]);      if merge_count == 2         port = merge(fundts{i-1},fundts{i},'datesetmethod','intersection');     end     if merge_count > 2         port = merge(port,fundts{i},'datesetmethod','intersection');     end     merge_count = merge_count + 1;  end 

% analyse portfolio

returns=tick2ret(port); q = portfolio; q = q.estimateassetmoments(returns) [qassetmean, qassetcovar] = q.getassetmoments 

this due merge. default, sorts columns alphabetically. unfortunately, naming pattern "fundn", means that, example, fund10 sorted before fund9. you're looping on 5 19, have fund10, through fund19, followed fund4 through fund9.

one way of solving use 0 padding (fund01, fund02, etc) alphabetical order , numerical order same. alternatively, force stay in order read/merge data setting sortcolumns 0:

port = merge(port,fundts{i},'datesetmethod','intersection','sortcolumns',0);