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Browse thousands of words and phrases selected by Financial Times editors and suggest new terms for the glossary.

 

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fat tails

A fat-tailed distribution is one of the so-called heavy-tailed statistical distributions that describe the probability of certain events. Fat tails have a sharp bell shape which leads to the term leptokurtosis, another name for a fat tailed distribution.

A probability distribution with fat tails would be one in which moderately extreme outcomes were more likely than you might have expected. Strictly speaking this differs from a long tailed distribution in would be one in which very very extreme...

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