Python…skew…kurtosis…
So you have a series of returns you wish to analyse….mean and variance are easy to calculate…how easy does Python make it to calculate skew and kurtosis?
When we look at a series of investment returns, we tend to concentrate on the first 2 ‘moments’ of the distribution; that is the mean and the variance of the returns. The mean gives us a representation of the average expected return, and the variance gives us a measure of the dispersion of returns around the mean. But those two measures don’t give us the full picture. There are ‘higher order’ moments to be aware of…