In: Finance
Why is it useful to calculate the standard deviation of expected returns on a security? What is the main practical reality that limits the usefulness of this calculation?
Standard deviation of expected return of a portfolio means that degree of deviation of expected return from the mean.
An investor uses the expected return to forecast return associated with portfolio and its uses standard deviation to discover that which are the outperformers of the portfolio and which are the underperformers of the portfolio. There is always an inclination to buy more of the outperformers and reduce more of the underperformers.
These are calculated to judge the overall performance of portfolio and the rate of expected deviation as well as the rate of expected return.
There are various limitation which are associated with standard deviation of expected return like the probabilities cannot be accurately estimated as well as the deviations are also an estimations from the original and when there are extreme values into the series, there is a limitation of use of standard deviation. Standard deviation are also complex to compute and these cannot be obtained for open end class frequency distribution.