We’re not trying to give anyone traumatic flashbacks or anything, but we’d like to take a second to mentally transport ourselves back to our middle-and-high-school math classes.
Remember learning about mean, median, and mode? And remember how the mean is the average of all the values we’re looking at? Okay, good. Now remember bell curves? Yes? Great. If we understand those two concepts, then we can wrap our heads around leptokurtic investments, no problem.
Let’s say we’re looking at a bunch of prices for a particular stock. And now let’s say we calculate the mean price and use standard deviations and other such fun to make ourselves a cute little bell curve. The top of the bell shows the mean, or the average price, while the sides of the bell (called “tails”) show the highest and lowest prices. When the tails of our bell are thicker than the normal bell curve distribution, the stock we’re looking at is said to be “leptokurtic:” it has a higher kurtosis—i.e., higher highs and lower lows—than normal. In other words, the highest price this stock has gone for is higher than what a normal distribution would indicate, and vice versa.
What this means for us as investors is that this particular stock may be a little risky. We could see a high rate of return…but we could also see a big loss. It doesn’t mean we will for sure, but simply that it’s happened before, and there’s potential for it to happen again.
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Finance: What is a Chartist?26 Views
Finance allah shmoop What is a chartist Well here's a
chart and here's a chart and here's a chart All
right Well these are pages from the investing bible of
a chartist A chartist is an investor really a traitor
as they tend to own stocks for a much shorter
period of time than a longer term Really invest or
type person a chartist relies solely on the patterns The
pattern's right there These are all patterns imputed by the
charts that they you know sitting poor threw for hours
and hours So check out this chart see how the
plotted data closely follows the characteristic line there The characteristic
line basically is plodded through all those dots Yes So
they're going to stare at that try to figure out
where that line is going in the future right Get
the crystal ball or all right Well let's look at
this one where the data forms what looks like Well
the head and shoulders of someone who you know doesn't
have a neck that's Just common pattern in trading And
you know if you stopped looking at it and two
thirds of the way through there it's heading down Well
Maybe you'd be short the stock for a few days
and then you see it bottoming and then you'd be
long and try to make money that way Good luck
All right len look at this chart Where is right
here where the data appears to We'll break away from
the established pattern which was all just kind of boring
Lee along down here And then suddenly everything goes up
Yeah start doing its own thing Well maybe the company
reported a good quarter or ah you know the government
cut taxes again Everything went up So these were the
tools of the chartist The chart's a chartist is the
opposite of a fundamental investor meaning that she doesn't know
or care what the company does for a living Really
she doesn't care about their p e ratio nor their
profit margins nor their debt levels on their balance sheet
nor much of anything fundamental about how their business runs
Chartist just care about the pattern they glean from the
charts and all the charts always work until they don't
And what happens when the meteor hits that is that 00:02:06.0 --> [endTime] predictable on a chart Ah
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