Standard deviation is a statistical metric that shows the distance of data from the average.

In statistics, the average amount a number varies from the average number in a series of numbers. THIS DEFINITION IS FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. All other reproduction requires permission.

Investopedia contributors come from a range of backgrounds, and over 25 years there have been thousands of expert writers and editors who have contributed. Andy Smith is a Certified Financial Planner ...

When working with a quantitative data set, one of the first things we want to know is what the "typical" element of the set looks like, or where the middle of the set is. We do this by finding a mean ...

How They Differ and Practical Uses in Finance and Investing Henry Hoenig has three decades of journalism experience as a news and economics editor in the U.S. and Asia, handling coverage of global ...

In response to my article, Is the Stock Market Too Concentrated?, which relied upon standard-deviation calculations to assess investment risk, a reader wrote: “My problem [with your argument] is ...

In statistics, the standard deviation is a measure of the amount of variation or dispersion of a set of values. A low standard deviation indicates that the values tend to be close to the mean (also ...