I am trying to resample some data from daily to monthly in a Pandas DataFrame. I am new to pandas and maybe I need to format the date and time first before I can do this, but I am not finding a good tutorial out there on the correct way to work with imported time series data. Everything I find is automatically importing data from Yahoo or Quandl.

Here is what I have in my DataFrame: dataframe segment screenshot

Here is the code I used to create my DataFrame:

#Import excel file into a Pandas DataFrame
df = pd.read_excel(open('2016_forex_daily_returns.xlsx','rb'), sheetname='Sheet 1')

#Calculate the daily returns
df['daily_ret'] = df['Equity'].pct_change()

# Assume an average annual risk-free rate over the period of 5%
df['excess_daily_ret'] = df['daily_ret'] - 0.05/252

Can someone help me understand what I need to do with the "Date" and "Time" columns in my DataFrame so I can resample?

For create DataFrame is possible use:

df = pd.read_excel('2016_forex_daily_returns.xlsx', sheetname='Sheet 1')
print (df)
        Date      Time  Equity
0 2016-01-03  22:16:22  300.38
1 2016-01-04  22:16:00  300.65
2 2016-01-05  14:26:02  301.65
3 2016-01-06  19:08:13  302.10
4 2016-01-07  18:39:00  302.55
5 2016-01-08  22:16:04  308.24
6 2016-01-11  02:49:39  306.69
7 2016-01-14  15:46:39  307.93
8 2016-01-19  15:56:31  308.18

I think you can first cast to_datetime column date and then use resample with some aggregating functions like sum or mean:

df.Date = pd.to_datetime(df.Date)
df1 = df.resample('M', on='Date').sum()
print (df1)
             Equity  excess_daily_ret
Date                                 
2016-01-31  2738.37          0.024252

df2 = df.resample('M', on='Date').mean()
print (df2)
                Equity  excess_daily_ret
Date                                    
2016-01-31  304.263333          0.003032

df3 = df.set_index('Date').resample('M').mean()
print (df3)
                Equity  excess_daily_ret
Date                                    
2016-01-31  304.263333          0.003032