What do means and standard deviations tell you?

What do means and standard deviations tell you?

Standard deviation tells you how spread out the data is. It is a measure of how far each observed value is from the mean. In any distribution, about 95% of values will be within 2 standard deviations of the mean.

Is high standard deviation bad?

Standard deviation is a number used to tell how measurements for a group are spread out from the average (mean ), or expected value. A low standard deviation means that most of the numbers are very close to the average . A high standard deviation means that the numbers are spread out.

What does higher standard deviation mean?

A standard deviation (or σ) is a measure of how dispersed the data is in relation to the mean. Low standard deviation means data are clustered around the mean, and high standard deviation indicates data are more spread out.

What is a good standard deviation for investments?

Standard deviation allows a fund’s performance swings to be captured into a single number. For most funds, future monthly returns will fall within one standard deviation of its average return 68% of the time and within two standard deviations 95% of the time.

How much is 2 standard deviations?

For an approximately normal data set, the values within one standard deviation of the mean account for about 68% of the set; while within two standard deviations account for about 95%; and within three standard deviations account for about 99.7%.

Can standard deviation be more than 3?

The answer is yes. (1) Both the population or sample MEAN can be negative or non-negative while the SD must be a non-negative real number. A smaller standard deviation indicates that more of the data is clustered about the mean while A larger one indicates the data are more spread out.