Tidy Data

library("tidyverse")

## -- Attaching packages --------------------------------------- tidyverse 1.3.0 --

## v ggplot2 3.3.3     v purrr   0.3.4
## v tibble  3.1.0     v dplyr   1.0.5
## v tidyr   1.1.3     v stringr 1.4.0
## v readr   1.4.0     v forcats 0.5.1

## -- Conflicts ------------------------------------------ tidyverse_conflicts() --
## x dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
## x dplyr::lag()    masks stats::lag()

stocks <- tibble(
  year   = c(2015, 2015, 2015, 2015, 2016, 2016, 2016),
  qtr    = c(   1,    2,    3,    4,    2,    3,    4),
  return = c(1.88, 0.59, 0.35,   NA, 0.92, 0.17, 2.66)
)
stocks %>% 
  pivot_wider(names_from = year, values_from = return,
              values_fill = 0)

## # A tibble: 4 x 3
##     qtr `2015` `2016`
##   <dbl>  <dbl>  <dbl>
## 1     1   1.88   0   
## 2     2   0.59   0.92
## 3     3   0.35   0.17
## 4     4  NA      2.66