Positive Kurtosis Meaning. Leptokurtic indicates a positive excess kurtosis. Sample kurtosis definitions a natural but biased estimator.
The distribution has a lower and wider peak and thinner tails. For a sample of n values a method of moments estimator of the population excess kurtosis can be defined as where m 4 is the fourth sample moment about the mean m 2 is the second sample moment about the mean that is the sample variance x i is the i th value and is the sample mean. An extreme positive kurtosis indicates a distribution where more of the values are located in the tails of the distribution rather than around the mean.
Leptokurtic indicates a positive excess kurtosis.
The solid line shows the normal distribution and the dotted line shows a distribution with a positive kurtosis value. A distribution with a positive kurtosis value indicates that the distribution has heavier tails than the normal distribution. The distribution has a lower and wider peak and thinner tails. For investors high kurtosis of the return distribution implies the investor will experience occasional extreme returns either positive or negative more extreme than the usual or three.
