Skewness and Kurtosis Formulas

[keep_running]

Hello,
Should we know how to calculate skewness and kurtosis in a distribution. The formulas seem pretty long…

 

[cpk123]

formulae - NO
meaning - YES
interpretation of a kurtosis or skewness number - YES

 

[leocfahelper]

cpk123 wrote:
formulae - NO
meaning - YES
interpretation of a kurtosis or skewness number - YES

I will second this as well.
But the big picture behind is that a lot of financial theory is based on “normal distribution”, but in the real world, most data are not normally distributed, and that’s why quant spends a lot of time “normalizing” (or transforming, if you are mathematically inclined) the data.